On Trans by Miller Oberman—National Poetry Month 2025

Poet Miller Oberman and his new collection Impossible Things.

Yesterday, April 1, was the Trans Day Visibility. But it is not too late for this apt verse from Miller Oberman, the author of Impossible Things, from Duke University Press, 2024 and The Unstill Ones, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017. He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Poems from Impossible Things have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Poems from The Unstill Ones appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, The Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review. Miller is an editor at Broadsided Press, which publishes visual-literary collaborations and teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in New York. 

 On Trans

The process of through is ongoing. 

 

The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall 

down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. 

 

We were just going. I was just leaving, 

which is to say, coming 

elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words 

 move through my limbs, lungs, mouth, as I appear to sit 

peacefully at your hearth       transubstantiating some wine. 

It was a rough red,                 it was one of those nights we were not 

forced by circumstances       to drink wine out of mugs. 

Circumstances being,            in those cases, no one had been 

 

transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. 

I brought armfuls of wood                              from the splitting stump. 

Many of them, because it was cold,                went right on top 

of their recent ancestors.                                It was an ice night. 

 

They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, 

bark to smoke, wood to ash.     I was 

transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly 

the same rate                            and everyone who looked, saw. 

 

The translucence of flames       beat against the air 

against our skins.                     This can be done with 

or without clothes on.              This can be done with 

or without wine or whiskey     but never without water: 

 

evaporation is also ongoing.                     Most visibly in this case 

in the form of wisps of steam                    rising from the just washed hair 

of a form at the fire whose beauty was      in the earth’s 

turning, that night and many nights,          transcendent. 

 

I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is 

transdesire, but in extreme cases      we call it transdire 

or when this heat becomes your maker we say 

transire, or when it happens             in front of a hearth: 

transfire. 

—Miller Oberman

Our National Poetry Month Series 2025 Kicks Of With Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath

It’s National Poetry Month again! If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 14th annual round-up of daily doses of verse! If you are new, here’s the scoop. Every day of the month I will feature poets and their poems. I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible in style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices. 

Many years certain themes emerge either by plan or by happenstance. This year I suspect we will share voices of experience of repression of all sorts and rising resistance. The times call for the poet as the prophet, tribune, and rebel. We’ll see. I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too. 

As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims. Yours may be different. But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers. I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts. I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff. Please feel free to turn me on to some. Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your own best stuff be it personal, political, or polemical. I don’t and can’t promise to use everything. E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net . 

Cheryl Caesar.

Today we will kick things off with a tone setter—Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath. Caesar is a writer, teacher of writing and visual artist living in Lansing, Michigan. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University and does research and advocacy for culturally-responsive pedagogy. 

Aftermath first appeared in Across the Margin. Cheryl’s chapbook of protest poetry Flatman (Thurston Howl Publications) is available from Amazon. 

Other artwork and verse has appeared in journals including Abergavenny Small Press Literary Journal, After the Pause, Angel Rust Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Breathe Everyone!, Datura Literary Journal, Fresh Words, The Gorko Gazette, Graphic Violence Lit, The Highland Park Poetry Challenge, Last Leaves Magazines, Plants and Poetry Journal, Poetic Sun, Punk Monk Magazine, Silver Birch Press, They Call Us Feminist Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, and The Washington Square Review. 

 Aftermath 

On the first day our Facebook pages went black. 

We drove to work through a film of tears 

and hugged each other in the hallways, unashamed,

and in the women’s room. We talked about renewing passports,

and families in Canada. We avoided referring

to the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. We went

on to meet our classes, or conference with students

who complained, “I didn’t know

this assignment would be so evidence-based.” 

We kept our blurry eyes front, and flowed

through the day on a current of work and love. 

 

On the second day, we posted galaxies and poems

of resistance on Facebook, and the numbers

of suicide hotlines. And Joplin’s “Solace” was playing

on WKAR on the way in, and the sun

reached a few gentle fingers through the clouds.

 So at work we taped the resistance poems

to the inside stall doors in the women’s room. 

In the halls we wondered how the Refugee

Development Center was doing, how we could help. 

         We went on to conference with students who said, 

“I just kinda smushed two facts and two sources together,”

for the sake of convenience. 

 

And we slept several hours each night, albeit 

          with Ambien, which we had been off for three months. 

And now I have to admit that I have no idea

whether anyone has gone back on Ambien but me. 

But it feels so much better, stronger, safer, to say “we,”

like Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, explaining, 

“We put the butter on our skin.” She had no idea either. 

But a friend had posted on Facebook, “This is no reason

to break your sobriety,” so I know others are tempted 

to temporary oblivion, and I kind of smush

the facts together.  Which is I guess

a definition of fiction. On Monday I will see

 

the fact-smushing student, and tell him, 

“So maybe research is not your jam.  Maybe you prefer

fiction. But in these times, submerged in a flood

of information, wouldn’t it be good to have a few tools

to tell the difference?” I hope it will work.  I hope

he still believes in some kind of truth. Yesterday he wrote,

“I used a reliable source but the facts were wrong. I learned

not to trust the internet.”

 —Cheryl Caesar

Mrs. Adams’ Famous Dear John Letter Laid Down Early Demands for the Ladies

Abigail Adams, painted here as the first mistress of the Executive Mansion in Washington D.C., kept up a frequent and detailed correspondence with her husband John while he was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress.

Note—This has become a semi-traditional wind-up for Women’s History Month here. 

 

On this date in 1776 as the Revolutionary War was still young and Boston was besieged by George Washington Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John who was in Philadelphia as a Delegate to the Continental Congress from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. The success of the war against the most powerful empire in the world was far from being assured and the Declaration of Independence, of which John was a prime mover, was yet months away. But amidst the turmoil Mrs. Adams admonished her husband not to neglect, as male governors had done from time immemorial, rights and needs of women. 

 

In the midst of a lengthy, chatty letter filled with news from home she included one remarkable passage, not even a full paragraph: 

 

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. 

 

Abigail may have regarded the threat of rebellion with tongue firmly in cheek. For his part John did not seem to take it seriously, although he frequently relied on his wife’s advice. Certainly, neither he nor Congress did anything about it. To lawyer Adams, women’s rights and privileges would certainly continue to be constrained by English Common Law which is to say they hardly existed. Women were and would remain virtual chattel first of their fathers and then of their husbands. Even widows and spinsters had precious little control of their property or affairs. 

 

Abigail's noted comment was contained in a short passage of the lengthy three page letter.

Mrs. Adams was 32 years old that year and the mother of five children. She was every inch the match of her husband, well read, keenly intelligent, strong willed, and independent. She comfortably mastered raising her brood and managing the affairs of the family and their small stone farm during the long absences—months, even years—while her husband was away helping to invent America and serve its interests. In New England where many wives of merchant traders, fishermen, and seafarers had to cope with such long absences perhaps women were more used to self-sufficiency than in other regions where they mostly stayed with their mates on family farms or tended house in villages and towns. 

 

Since the letter was not a public document, it roused no movement among women who might have been similarly disposed. It was not published until 1848 when Abigail’s grandson Charles Francis Adams included it in his multi-volume compendium of their correspondence. Of interest mostly to serious historians, the books were not widely read, and little special notice was given to a single passage which was not echoed anywhere else in the collection of missives. 

 

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited Abigail's phrases in the first volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage more than 100 years after she wrote it.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took note of the letter in the first volume of their epic History of Woman Suffrage which was first published in 1886. Slowly the quote spread in the suffrage movement largely to add a connection to the nation’s founders. 

 

But it was the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s that really made the passage famous. Gloria Steinem featured it in early issues of MS. Magazine and was featured on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and demonstration placards. 

 

 

Dozens of widely circulated memes keep Abigail's words alive on the internet.

In the 21st Century it has become widely shared as a meme. Whatever Abigail intended by her passing comment, it certainly has grown legs.

When Seward Bought the Ice Box from the Tsar for Pocket Change and Lint

The Negotiators--Left to right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State William H. Seward, William Hunter, Russian chargé d'affaires Bodisco, Russian Ambassador Baron de Stoeckl, Senator Charles Sumner. 

Secretary of State William H. Seward, a hold-over from the Lincoln Administration in the Cabinet of weak and unpopular President Andrew Johnson, concluded secret negotiations with envoys from Tsar Alexander II of Russia on March 30, 1867. With a flourish of a pen he acquired Russian America, a huge territory encompassing 586,412 square miles occupying the northwest of North America. 

 

Of course the interests and claims of the indigenous peoples who had already been enslaved and abused by the Russians and who didn’t recognize the land as the Tsar’s to sell were not considered at all. 

 

Approved by Congress, not without controversy but in good time, the Treasury Department dutifully paid for the deal in full with a single check for $7 million, the equivalent of just a little over two cents an acre—virtual pocket change. From a narrow strip of land along the Pacific Coast it opened up into trackless forest, rugged mountains, tundra, perpetually snow and ice covered lands on the Arctic Sea. Except along the coast and a string of fur trading posts the new land was vastly under populated with only about 2,500 Russians and creoles, and 8,000 native peoples under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and an estimated 50,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other native tribes in the vast ungoverned areas.  

 

Russian America in 1867.

 

A once lucrative trade in sea otter, harbor seal, and other furs was petering out due to excessive harvesting. The territory had no other known resources except for timber too remote to get to markets. The Russians had staked a claim to the whole Pacific Coast as far south as Spanish held Yerba Buena—later San Francisco—based on the explorations of Vitus Bering and his successors beginning in 1741. A lucrative fur trade was established and in 1799 the Russian-America Company was given exclusive rights and charged with governing. 

 

By the early 19th Century much of the area along the coast was being contested by claims by the British and Americans. The British relied on activity by their Hudson’s Bay Company around Vancouver Island and the Americans on the explorations of Lewis and Clark and activity by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. The rivalry first centered on what became called Oregon. The Russian agreed to a treaty with the Americans in the 1840’s that ceded their coastal claims south of Vancouver. 

 

The British, however, were a more troubling rival. Not only had the Russians been at war with them in the Crimea from 1853-56, but they were also emerging as a global threat the Tsarist empire. After gold was discovered along the Thompson River in 1858, the British established the Crown Colony of British Columbia to reinforce their claims on the mainland north of the recently settled border with American-held Oregon abutting the already established Crown Colony of Vancouver (1849) on the island. These territories began to fill with gold seekers and settlers, were soon fairly strongly garrisoned with troops and the natural harbors made a perfect base for the mighty Royal Navy. 

 

In St. Petersburg, the Russian government determined that its North American possessions were indefensible in the event of new hostilities with Britain. Feelers went out to both the British and Americans about a possible sale. The British turned the offer down, probably believing that they would sooner or later come into possession anyway. Serious negotiations with the United States never got underway after the Civil War broke out. The end of the war in the U.S coincided with a huge loan from the House of Rothschild to the Tsar to pay off the debts of the Crimean War coming due. Short on cash and fearing default, the Tsar dispatched a high level team to Washington to negotiate a deal that would pay off the loan, or most of it, and checkmate British ambitions in the Northern Pacific. The shrewd Steward recognized that he had the Russians over the barrel. 

The Treasury Department check for $7 million  in specie used to pay for Alaska and stamped "Paid/"

 

He needed to buy the territory for a sum that would not require any borrowing on the US’s part and which could easily be paid in a lump sum out of Treasury reserves. The Russians were forced to settle for $7 million, far less than they had hoped. The history books would have us believe that the whole nation mocked Seward’s Folly as a wasteful, bad investment. But it was actually only a noisy minority in the press who made the biggest stink. Most Americans, if they paid attention at all, where more than happy to grab more land and pinch British Columbia in on both sides. Many believed that the purchase would lead to the eventual acquisition of the British colonies on the coast.   The treaty sailed through a Senate dominated by a Republican super majority, many of the Senators loyal to Seward, if not his erstwhile Democratic boss. 

 

A typical cartoon mocking the sale shows Seward and President Andrew Johnson hauling away ice while a laughing Russian officer makes off with a $7 bag of gold. 

 

But the protesting press was loud and creative. Alaska was denounced as a frozen wilderness not worth accepting even as a gift. One unknowingly prescient editorialist said that the government would never recoup its investment unless gold was unexpectedly discovered at some distant time. Of course gold was discovered, but not until 1898 when the Alaskan Gold Rush erupted. By that time other Alaskan resources, particularly its fisheries, were also beginning to pay off. 

 

But all of that was far in the future when Russian America became the U. S. Department of Alaska under the military governance of General Jefferson C. Davis—no, not the former Confederate President, the former Union officer. A ceremony in the muddy streets of Sitka on October 16, 1867 outside of the log Government House hauled down the Russian Double Eagle flag—after three soldiers had to be sent shinnying up the flag pole to cut it loose from a snag—and raised the Stars and Stripes . A handful of American troops and ships in the harbor rattled off a ragged salute. 

 

General Jefferson C. Davis, seated, takes control of Alaska in Sitka from Russian officials.  Note the portrait of the Tsar being taken down.  It is doubtful that a portrait of President Andrew Johnson who was on shaky ground with Congress and would soon face impeachment was hung in its place.

 

The Russian residents and Creoles were supposed to be given three years to take American citizenship or return to their homeland. But General Davis ordered most Sitka residents evicted from their homes to make way for Americans and general lawlessness soon overtook the district. Most Russians packed up their belongings and headed home on the first overcrowded ships available. 

 

Alaska finally became the 49th State on January 3, 1960. In the end the massive natural resources of Alaska including not only gold, but copper and other metals, fisheries, timber, and at last oil and natural gas, made Steward’s investment one of the shrewdest in history. It also became a strategic check to the Japanese in World War II and the Soviets in the Cold War. 

 

Ask Sarah Palin who said she could see Russia from her house…

Haven’t We Met Before? A Familiar Dutchman and Sweden’s Claim in America

Peter Minuit, Former Governor of New Amsterdam, famous for purchasing Manhattan Island from the natives, led the Swedish colonization project after being ousted by his Dutch bosses.

Ok, quickly now, students, go to a map and show me the location of the colony of New Sweden. What? You say you’ve never heard of such a thing? Well on March 29, 1638 two ships carrying Swedish and Finnish—Finland was at the time part of Sweden—immigrants sailed up Delaware River and landed near modern day Wilmington. They claimed the river and its drainage for the New Sweden Company. 

 

In command was a veteran of North American colonization, Peter Minuit. Minuit is familiar to school children as the Dutch Governor of New Netherland who supposedly swindled Native Americans out of the island of Manhattan for $24 in beads and trinkets. Like most such arch-typical tales, the story was only half right. Minuit did purchase the island—and near-by Staten Island—for about 60 Guilders—a significant sum in those days—in trade goods including steel ax heads, needles, hoes, drilling awls, pots, and trade wampum. A historian described it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.” Both parties to the deal were happy and neither felt cheated. 

 

Minuit served as governor from 1626 to 1631 when he was suspended by the Dutch West Indies Company because the fur trade with Native Americans, which was supposed to finance the colony, was less remunerative than anticipated and because Minuit was suspected of skimming for his personal purse. Outraged Minuit turned to the Swedes, who were going about the business of entering the competition for New World riches. They were glad to have him. 

 

Queen Christiana was the early teenage daughter of Gustavus Adolphus when Stuyvesant sailed up the Delaware River.  She was called the most learned woman in Europe but created a scandal by refusing to marry or produce an heir and by famously cross dressing.  When she abandoned Sweden's Lutheran state church and converted to Catholicism she abdicated her throne at age 28 in 1654.  She was memorably portrayed by Greta Garbo in a famous 1933 MGM biopic that wrote in a love story with a Spanish Catholic diplomat as a cover for the real Queen's lesbianism.

 

Sweden, at the time, was at its height of its influence as a world power. It ruled over much of Scandinavia including Finland, and most of Norway, portions of Russia, all of modern Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania, parts of Poland, Germany, and Denmark. The Baltic Sea was a virtual Swedish lake. The Swedes felt more than ready to join the mercantile powers in America.

 

Minuit established Fort Christina, in honor of Sweden’s twelve year old Queen. But as Minuit well knew, the drainage of the Delaware River was claimed by the Dutch. After establishing his colony, Minuit decided to return to Sweden for more colonists and make a dash down to the Caribbean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the trip profitable. Unfortunately, he was killed in a hurricane off of St. Christopher. 

 

A museum model of Fort Christina.

 

Over the next dozen years 12 groups of settlers totaling more than 600 reached New Sweden and established settlements on both sides of the river. The settlers were mostly small farmers. They introduced a form of shelter never seen before in the new world—the log cabin—which would become the standard pioneer abode for the next two hundred years. They had excellent relations with the local tribes and lived comfortably with the near-by Dutch until a new governor arrived in 1654 and seized the Dutch post of Fort Casamir, modern day New Castle. 

 

A tapestry hanging in the American Swedish Museum in Philadelphia depicts the Swede's most enduring cultural legacy in the New World--the log cabin

 

The notoriously bellicose Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, dispatched five armed ships and 317 professional soldiers to retake the post. They then proceeded up the river and forced the surrender of Ft. Christina. That ended Swedish sovereignty over the area. 

 

The wrath of peg-legged Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant upon learning that the Swedes had captured Fort Casamir was depicted in this painting.
 

But the Dutch made no attempt to expel the existing settlers. In fact they granted them extraordinary rights to retain their lands, practice their Lutheran religion, and govern themselves as a quasi-independent “Swedish Nation.” But the Dutch themselves were not long to retain their American possessions. After a series of wars, they were gone for good by 1674 and New Netherland became New York. 

 

In 1681 William Penn was granted his charter for Pennsylvania, which included the “Three Lower Counties” which make up today’s Delaware. The Swedes, with no reinforcements coming from the mother country for decades, were quickly subsumed by the British. 

 

Hundreds of years later an Irish American from Pennsylvania would settle in Delaware and put the small often ignored state back on the map of American consciousness. But damned few of Joe Biden’s Senate constituents were decedents of those old Swede settlers.

Horseshoe Bend Was Old Hickory’s Other 1814 Battle

A diorama at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park depicts the members of the 39th Regiment of U.S. Infantry breaching the Creek fortification during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

In 1814 Andrew Jackson took a little trip. But despite the memorable ballad, he never came “down the Mighty Mississip.” Well before he got to New Orleans he and an army of Tennessee Volunteers, Army Regulars, and a few hundred Cherokee and other native allies plunged deep into the Alabama wilderness in pursuit of a “renegade” faction of the Creek Nation or Muskogee known as the Red Sticks. He found them at a place called Horseshoe Bend and fought them in the most important American battle you have probably never heard of. 

 

Historians are somewhat divided on how to categorize the conflict. Many, maybe most, put it in the broader context of the on-going War of 1812 because the Red Sticks were informal allies of the British and were largely armed with weapons smuggled from Spanish Florida. Others insist on calling it a distinct Red Stick or Creek War and placing it more generally in the context of an on-going, genocidal land grab from Native Americans. It seems to me it was both. 

 

The whole thing started as something of a civil war within the Creek Nation. The Creek were a large tribe whose traditional territories and hunting grounds stretched from western Georgia across much of the mid-South. Like their cousins, and sometimes rivals for hunting grounds, the Cherokee, they were considered one of the Civilized Tribes because they tended to live in permanent or semi-permanent settlements and engaged in extensive agriculture in addition to hunting. In the eastern and southern portions of their range in Georgia, many had adopted White farming methods, clothing, and customs. Many intermarried with frontier Whites and the more prosperous owned slaves. 

 

This 1898 map shows the range of the Creek or Muskogee in green at the time of first contact with European settlers.  Eastern bands and those further west and along the Gulf Coast split around the War of 1812 and were in a civil war of their own.  The Seminoles in Florida were still a nation in formation made up of refugee Creeks, several local tribes, escaped slaves, and some Spanish peons.
 

When war broke out with the British these Creeks, who had lived cheek to jowls with Whites in a sometimes dicey, but essentially stable relationship for decades, declared their allegiance to the United States and expressed willingness to support the Army militarily if need be. A larger group of Creeks residing further inland, however, maintained their traditional culture and were resentful of both the “civilized” branch of the tribe and the continuing pressure of encroaching settlement in their territory by Whites. 

 

In 1811 the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, a close ally of the British, toured the Five Civilized Tribes of the South in an effort to bring them into his Indian Confederacy to oppose American expansion. The British, he told tribal leaders, would provide arms and guarantee a permanent Native homeland off limits to settlement. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Lower Creeks, and other tribes who all had treaties with the U.S. refused to join. But the Red Sticks, influenced by younger warriors, were ready for war against the Americans. 

 

They did not formally join Tecumseh’s Confederacy but became allies and allies of the British, who were active in near-by Florida. The Red Sticks were soon raiding isolated farms and settlements in a relatively low key guerilla war. In support of their treaty commitments, Lower Creeks asserted their claim to tribal leadership and moved against the Red Sticks, arresting those warriors they could find. The Red Sticks responded with attacks on the Lower Creeks including the slaughtering of cattle, pigs, and other domestic animals that were symbolic of adoption of white ways. 

 

In July of 1813 a sizable party of Red Sticks was returning from Florida with a pack train of horses loaded down with corn meal, powder, shot, and arms purchased with £500 sent to them by the British via the Spanish in Florida. Lower Creeks got wind of the transaction and sent word to American troops at Fort Mims, Alabama. Troops under Major Daniel Beasley of the Mississippi Volunteers led a mounted force of 6 companies of 150 white militia riflemen, 30 mixed blood Creek known as métis under Captain Dixon Bailey to intercept Red Stick Leader Peter McQueen’s party. The troops surprised McQueen during a mid-day meal break and quickly scattered them, capturing the pack train. But the undisciplined Militia fell into a frenzy of looting as they tore into the packs. McQueen rallied his warriors in the surrounding swamp and re-took the camp and supplies in a bloody fight known as the Battle of Burnt Corn. 

 

After the battle McQueen and other Red Stick leaders called for a massing of warriors. Raids stepped up. Panicked settlers, their slaves, métis and other Lower Creeks sought refuge at Fort Mims, which was palisaded with a block house. About 520 people including 230 ill trained Militia and Creek warriors, crowded into the fort which was located about 40 north of Mobile on the Alabama River. 

 

On August 29 somewhere between 750 and 1000 Red Sticks led by McQueen and the other head warrior, William Weatherford or Red Eagle launched an attack on the Fort, symbolically also at a noon lunch break. Major Beasley had neglected to put out pickets or sentries and had ignored the warnings of two slaves who had been gathering firewood outside the post. One gate of the fort could not even be completely closed because of drifting sand. 

 

The virtual massacre at Ft. Mims sent the Alabama frontier into a panic and led to the punitive expedition commanded by Andrew Jackson.

The Red Sticks stormed and easily took the outer palisade as the soldiers and civilians retreated behind a lower secondary defense. Captain Bailey rallied his forces and held off the attackers for two hours all the while being peppered by fire by Creeks using the outer perimeter’s gun loops. Both sides suffered significant losses. The Red Stick retreated outside the walls to regroup. A second attack at 3 pm sent the defenders reeling back to their block house bastion, which the attackers set on fire. After resistance finally collapsed around 5 pm warriors began to club and tomahawk the wounded and other survivors despite Weatherford’s attempts to restrain them. At least 250 were killed and scalped, their bodies left where they lay. The Red Sticks spared about 100 surviving slaves but took them captive along with 30 or so women and children. 36 defenders, including the mortally wounded Captain Bailey escaped to tell the tail. 

 

Two weeks later a relief column arrived to find the Fort destroyed and the bodies of both the defenders and about 100 Red Sticks rotting in the sun. The news of the Fort Mims Massacre set off a panic across the frontier. Settlers streamed to the safety of older settlements. The Federal Government was unable to provide much help. Most of the Army was on the Canadian Frontier or scattered in costal defense forts. The best they could do was to call up the Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi militia and volunteers and place them under the overall command of lawyer/planter/politician General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. While other militia units mostly took up defensive positions on the edge of Red Stick territory, Jackson assembled an army to extract vengeance and, “Make Alabama safe for White settlement.” 

 

Andrew Jackson, veteran commander of the Tennessee Militia was placed in Command by the War Department of a large joint force of militia from 5 states or territories, volunteers, Regular Army, and Native American auxiliaries to punish the Red Sticks.
 

Jackson had commanded the Tennessee Militia since 1802. Under his over-all command units had been engaged in the ongoing Indian Wars that consumed the frontier in the years after the American Revolution. Not only did his Tennesseans include many veteran Indian fighters and experienced officers, but Jackson had drilled and trained them. These troops in no way resembled the rag-tag militias most states sent into the field. They were well armed, well trained and fiercely loyal to their demanding commander. 

 

As soon as weather permitted in 1814 Jackson headed into Alabama at the head of an army of over 3000—2000 infantry including a company Regular Army 39th Infantry Regiment, 700 cavalry and mounted riflemen, and 600 Cherokee, Choctaw and Lower Creek auxiliaries. He also had at least two batteries of field howitzers. Jackson marched his column through the wilderness with discipline and as much stealth as an army on the move could muster. 

 

Chief Menawa's Red Stick camp at Horseshoe bend was the target of Jackson's campaign.  A naturally excellent defensive position, Menawa employed field fortifications across the neck of the loop in the river rarely employed by Native Americans

 

By March 27 his scouts informed him that he was within six miles of Chief Menawa’s Red Stick camp of Tohopeka, nestled in a loop in the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend in central Alabama. Jackson sent his close friend and longtime political crony General John Coffee with the mounted riflemen and the native auxiliaries south across the river to surround the Red Sticks’ camp, while Jackson stayed with the rest of the 2,000 infantry north of the neck created by the bend in the river. He found the camp surprisingly well fortified behind an impressive earth and log breastworks stretching across the neck. The logs were laid in a 400 yard zigzag line that permitted a lethal enfilading fire from behind its protections. These kinds of field fortifications were seldom encountered in Indian warfare.

 

A map of the battlefield based on rough sketch maps used by Jackson.

 Around ten o’clock in the morning, Jackson opened up with his artillery on the line. He pounded away for nearly two hours with no discernible damage to the fortifications. The fire also concentrated the attention of the Red Stick camp, which failed to detect General Coffee’s maneuvers to their rear. Around noon Jackson ordered a frontal bayonet charge on the breastworks led by Colonel John Williams’s Regular Infantry. Despite taking heavy losses, the troops gained the wall and some got over it. That included Third Lieutenant Sam Houston who made it over the wall only to be gravely injured by an arrow in the thigh, a wound that would bother him the rest of his long and colorful life. 

Third Lt. Sam Houston was severely injured by an arrow in the thigh after breaching the fortifications.
 

As more of Jackson’s men poured over the works, the fight turned into a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. Then the Red Sticks were hit from the rear by Coffee’s men. The fighting continued for hours over a large battlefield that provided good cover for the defenders, who refused to surrender, at least as reported in the official reports of the action. Red Stick losses, almost all killed, were around 80% of the estimated 1000 warriors in the camp. A wounded Chief Menawa and about 200 managed to escape and make their way to Florida where they were welcomed and absorbed by the Seminoles there. The battle broke Red Stick power. 

 

The old General established Fort Jackson near Wetumpka, Alabama as a base of operations for mopping up actions. He dispatched messengers to summon tribal leaders to sign what everyone knew would be a dictated peace treaty. Among the messengers was Sgt. Davy Crockett, an experienced hunter who was fluent in Creek and other Indian languages. He grew to sympathize with the defeated enemy and their harsh treatment at Jackson’s hand eventually made him a Whig and Old Hickory’s political enemy. 

 

Tennessee militia Sgt. Davy Crockett acted as a messenger and translator to tribal leaders after the battle.  But he was so horrified by the brutal treatment of the Red Sticks that he became a friend to the native tribes and as a Whig the lifelong opponent of Andrew Jackson.

The treaty signed by leaders of several bands including the Red Stick Upper Creeks, and the Lower Creeks on August 9, 1814 ceded 23 million acres of their remaining land in Georgia and much of central Alabama to the United States government. The loyal Lower Creek were shocked to be told that they had to give up their lands but had no choice. And the Choctaw and Cherokee who also fought alongside the Americans discovered that the Creeks had signed away land that they had long considered theirs. 

 

William Weatherford, Red Eagle, meets the General at Ft. Jackson where Creeks, both Red Stick and loyal Southern bands were forced to sign a treaty that ceded virtually of their lands and hunting grounds--and lands claimed by the Cherokee and Choctaw--to the United States.

Removal was not immediate although some bands began relocating across the Mississippi within a couple of years. The rest followed over time or were force marched out under Jackson’s unforgiving and absolute Indian Removal program during his presidency. 

 

As a reward Jackson was promoted to Major General of Volunteers and kept in the field. Meanwhile the British, in a tardy response to the appeal for aid by the Red Sticks, had enlisted survivors in Spanish Florida and began arming others as they arrived. They garrisoned 400 Royal Marines at Pensacola.

 

Without authority, Jackson marched his army into supposedly neutral Spanish territory easily taking the city and dispelling the threat. The move also prevented Britain’s new Creek and other native allies from pressing their attempted siege of Mobile. Having essentially secured the Gulf Coast, Jackson then marched his battle hardened army overland to reinforce threatened New Orleans. You probably know the rest of the story. 

 

American school children used to learn about the famous Battle of Tippecanoe in which General William Henry Harrison killed Tecumseh and destroyed forever the threat of his Confederacy. That, they knew, safely opened up the Old Northwest Territory for settlement. But for some reason they are not taught about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend which had an equally disastrous effect on the Southern tribes and entailed an even larger direct land grab.

Weeping for the Piles of Dead Women on a New York Street

Police and bystanders watch helplessly as more victims jump to their deaths to escape the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the upper floors of the Asch Building.

It was a sunny but raw day in New York City, a late Saturday afternoon and the streets near Washington Square in the immigrant Greenwich Village neighborhood were teaming with traffic. Around 4:45, as the many garment industry sweatshops were preparing for their “early” Saturday closing, pedestrians began to notice smoke billowing from the upper floors of the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place. Crowds gathered to watch as horse drawn fire engines and ladder trucks pounded to the scene. Soon witnesses watched in horror as one after another young women leapt from the burning building to sure death on the pavement below—the Fire Department’s ladders were too short to reach the windows from which they jumped. It was March 25, 1911. The top three floors of the building, housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had turned into a roaring inferno. 

The Fire Department responded quickly but did not have ladders tall enough to reach the top three floors which were on fire and fire fighters could not get up stairways choked with the bodies of those trying to escape.  They could only use their most powerful pumpers to spay water from the outside.

About 500 workers were getting ready to leave when the fire started smoldering in the scrap bin under a cutting table, probably ignited by a carelessly discarded cigarette or cigar. Before it was over 146 of them, mostly young Italian and Jewish women, would perish. Many would be piled against locked exit doors to die of asphyxiation. Sixty-two victims leaped to their death on the sidewalk or were killed when the sole fire escape collapsed. Others jumped down elevator shafts after the elevators, which managed to rescue several, stopped working when the fire’s heat twisted the rails on which they ran. At least 71 others were reported injured, although many more were probably tended at home, unable to afford medical care. 

It was not the first fire in such a factory. In fact, authorities had reported an epidemic of fires at shirtwaist factories. This was one, however, was made worse because of overcrowding on the shop floors, failure to clear flammable material—scrap bins had not been emptied in two months—and because stairways and exits were either blocked by bales of material or padlocked to prevent employee pilferage. 

The factory occupied floors 8, 9, and 10  of the building, all beyond the reach of ladders which could only reach the sixth floor at full extension. There was no alarm system and on the most crowded production floor, the 9th, the first warning was literally when flames erupted. By that time most office personnel, including the owners and their visiting children had already been able to evacuate from the higher floor to the safety of the roof. 

There had, of course, been awful industrial accidents and fires before. Mine collapses were commonplace. Many were killed in boiler explosions on steamships and riverboats, others died in railroad accidents. Fires had devastated lint-filled textile plants. But never had such a calamity played out so publicly on the streets of the nation’s premier city with the press—including photographers—on hand to record the horror. The fact that most of the victims were young women, girls in their teens mostly, added to the impact. Grimy men were expected to be expendable, girls were not. 

 The sewing floor of a typical shirtwaist factory and the young women who worked there.

Lurid headlines and gruesome photos spread across the country. Both the city and state governments launched investigations, which would lead eventually to the establishment of the nation’s strongest industrial workplace safety and labor laws in New York state. It spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and other needle trade unions which made safety a key issue.   Many years later the Federal government added its weight to worker safety with the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) under the Department of Labor. 

The labor movement commemorates the anniversary, but the hard fought gains paid for by those dead shop girls are under attack from coast-to-coast. Under the guise of cost cutting, deregulation, and as a frank assault on the working class on behalf of an oligarchy, Trump and Musk’s DOGE dudes have attempted to slash jobs at the agency and across the Department of Labor and OSHA itself is on the chopping block while blocking in every possible way the rights of workers to defend themselves through unions or by suing for damages in the courts. The old battles have to be refought. Hopefully it will not take another tragedy of epic proportion to re-prick the public conscience. 

Protests like this large parade featuring a contingent of Jewish women workers from the United Hebrew Trades demanded enactment of factory safety laws and organized shops into powerful unions.

In 2012, after years of painstaking research, the last 10 victims of the fire were finally identified. Today the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building, still stands. It is a designated landmark, as much, we are told, for its architectural significance as the site of a tragedy.

The Lioness Who Roared Ida B. Wells Launched a War on Lynching

                                            Ida B. Wells, undaunted.

The word to describe Ida B. Wells, who died on March 25, 1931 at age 68, was fierce. The word more commonly used, formidable, is entirely inadequate for a life of defiance and struggle that began in slavery during the Civil War and ended just before the New Deal. Along the way she was the associate or opponent—sometimes both the with the same person—of Fredrick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Francis Willard, Jane Adams, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Alice Paul, and Marcus Garvey. She exposed the lynch mobs running rampant in the Jim Crow South, helped found the NAACP and half a dozen other important organizations, pioneered the Great Migration from the rural South to Chicago and other Northern industrial cities, and demanded equal voting rights for women and African-Americans. When she died it was as if a visceral force of nature had suddenly vanished.

 

Wells was born in slavery as the Civil War was marching toward the end of servitude on July 16, 1862 on a plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents were among a sort of slave elite, spared the drudgery of the fields and by in large the lash. Her father, James Wells, was a master carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Warrenton Wells, was a prized cook. Both were literate and began to teach their daughter as soon as she was big enough to hold a book. 

 

After emancipation, James Wells became a known Race Man, a vocal leader among his people and ambitious for himself, his family, and his race. He managed to attend Shaw University, now Rust College, in Holly Springs for a while. He was a leading member of the local chapter of the Loyalty League, a kind of Republican Party auxiliary in support of Reconstruction and opposed to the Ku Klux Klan. He spoke for Republican candidates and his home was a center for political action, but he never himself ran for office. If the family’s politics were firmly Republican, mother Lizzie made sure that young Ida was brought up in the firm Christian principles of the Baptist faith. 

 

From the beginning she showed a fierce independence and a quick temper at perceived injustices. Her parents enrolled her at Shaw, but after a few months was expelled for a sharp exchange with the college president. She was sent to visit her grandmother to cool down while her father tried to mend fences.

 

Ida’s nurturing and stimulating home was shattered in 1878 while on that visit. She got word that her parents and an infant brother were all struck down in a devastating yellow fever epidemic that swept the South. Orphaned at 16, she resisted efforts to parcel out five other younger siblings to relatives. She was determined to keep the family together. Ida took a job teaching in segregated schools, working at a distance from home and coming back on weekends and holidays while her paternal grandmother cared for the children. 

 

From the beginning she was outraged that as a Black teacher, her salary was $30 a month, less than half the pay of Whites. After a few years to improve her lot, she moved with most of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, the bustling economic capitol of the Mississippi Delta, and the home to a large and sophisticated Black community. By 1883 she was employed by the Shelby County School District in nearby Woodstock. During the summers she studied at Fisk University across the state in Nashville and she also frequently visited family in Mississippi. 

 

So, Ida was a veteran train rider. She knew the conditions of segregation in the cars well that had taken quick root after the Supreme Court had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 the previous year. That act had banned discrimination on public accommodations in interstate commerce—railroads. 

 

On May 4, 1884 Wells was ordered out of her seat by a conductor to make room for a white passenger. She refused to be relocated to the smoking parlor and had to be dragged from the train by two or three men. Almost 50 years before Rosa Parks, Ida would not submit so passively to arrest. 

 

                                Cartoonist Kate Beaton depicted Ida B. Wells's defining moment on a train in her Hark! A Vagrant.

Back in Memphis she hired a prominent Black attorney to sue the railroad and wrote about her experience and cause in the Black church newspaper The Living Way. Despite her attorney being bribed by the railroad to sabotage her case, Wells won a $500 judgment. The state Supreme Court later overturned the verdict and ordered her to pay steep court costs. But the event made her a hero in the Black community and launched her on a second career as a journalist and crusader. 

 

In addition to The Living Way, she was hired to contribute articles to the Evening Star. She was an outspoken commenter on race issues while continuing to teach. In 1889 Rev. R. Nightingale of the Beale Street Baptist Church invited Wells to become co-owner and editor of his anti-segregationist newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight. With the end of Reconstruction and the dawning of the Jim Crow era violence against Blacks to “put them back in their place” was escalating. Wells made a specialty of documenting outrages. 

 

In March of 1892 the three proprietors of the thriving People’s Grocery Store in Memphis, which was seen as competition and an affront to White businesses, were attacked by a mob and dragged from their store. A crowd from the community gathered to defend the men and three of the white attackers were shot. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, all personal friends of Wells, were arrested and jailed. A mob broke into the jail and murdered the men. 

 

Wells had been out of town at the time of the attack. But she rushed home and began writing furiously. Finally, she concluded that if the leading business people in the Black community were not safe from lynching nobody was. Sadly and reluctantly, she advised her readers: 

 

There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons. 

 

Receiving daily death threats Wells armed herself with a pistol. Three months after her friends were lynched a mob attacked and burned the offices of Free Speech and Headlight. She took up the cause of exposing and fighting lynch law with a vengeance and unmatched passion. Speaking to women’s clubs around the country about her documented research on how widespread it had become, Wells raised enough money to publish a pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases. Later she documented the atrocities in detail in an even more shocking book, A Red Record, which made her a celebrity. 

 

                                                                A Red Record, Well’s classic lynching exposé made her famous.

 

Ida also breached the taboo topic of sex, repudiating the popular myth that many lynchings were to protect pure white womanhood from predatory Black males. She documented that most interracial sexual liaisons were not only voluntary, but were initiated by Whites, women as well as men. 

 

Sooner rather than later she had to take her own advice. In 1893 she relocated to Chicago, the tip of the spear of the Great Migration which would fill Northern cities with Southern Blacks. She continued to speak out on lynching and contributed to black newspapers. 

 

But she did not confine herself to the issue of lynching. She had been drawn to Chicago by the World Columbian Exposition. She was soon collaborating with Fredrick Douglass in urging a Black boycott of the Fair in protest to discrimination in hiring construction workers and more skilled workers—Blacks were only hired for the most menial tasks and as waiters and porters. She contributed to the pamphlet, Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. More than 20,000 copies were circulated to fair visitors. 

 

\Wells launched an extensive speaking tour which took her to many Northern cities and to visits to England to promote her anti-lynching campaign. She was greeted as a hero in London. She also met and was impressed by the leading English Suffragettes. While in town she became embroiled in a bitter public newspaper exchange with another visiting American reformer, Francis Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who asserted that Blacks were not ready for or deserving of equality until they gave up drinking, which she said was epidemic. Wells, herself a teetotaler, refuted the charges in none too temperate language. 

 

In 1895 Wells married the editor of Chicago’s first major Black newspaper, Chicago Conservator, Ferdinand L. Barnett. Barnett was also a lawyer and former Assistant States Attorney. They had met shortly before her departure from Memphis when Barnett served as her pro bono attorney in a libel case. She became stepmother to his two children and the devoted couple had four more. She continued her public career but frankly sometimes had difficulty balancing home and other commitments. 

 

                                                      Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her children in 1909.

Well’s interest in women’s issues was almost as strong as her devotion to her race. She felt the two causes were not only complimentary, but inseparable. In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women, and also founded the National Afro-American Council. She also formed the Women’s Era Club, the first civic organization for Black women which was later renamed for its founder. The latter organization brought her into close collaboration with Jane Adams and they jointly campaigned against the segregation of Chicago Public Schools and on other reforms. Her frequent lectures on behalf of universal suffrage attracted the attention and admiration of the aging founder of the movement, Susan B. Anthony. When Wells had to dial back some of her commitments for a while after the birth of her second child, Anthony publicly lamented the loss. 

 

In 1909 she was one of the prominent leaders to join with W.E.B. Dubois, Mary White Ovington, and others to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). However, her name was left out of publicity about the founding and she was one of the few principal founders not to get a prominent office in the new organization. Dubois claimed that Wells asked not to be listed, and later corrected the founding story. Few people, least of all Wells herself who was not one to hide her light under a bushel, believed the story. 

 

There was frankly a kind of rivalry between two of the best known and most militant Black leaders both of whom had risen to prominence as journalists and muckrakers. Despite the snub, Wells remained active in the organization and for his part Dubois published her articles in The Crisis. 

 

The always outspoken Wells was not afraid of controversy within the Black community and movement. She was an early and outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington, the figure often held up by the White establishment as the modest model of Black leadership for demanding few concessions from Whites and advocating self-improvement through education. She also drew the wrath of many black leaders by praising Marcus Garvey for his message of economic self-sufficiency for Blacks and was one of the few to publicly defend him when he was accused of mail fraud in a Federal indictment in 1919. Despite the criticisms, her embrace of Pan-Africanism and particularly the Back to Africa aspects of Garvey’s movement was limited. She preferred to live and fight in the United States. And after Garvey flirted with an alliance with the Ku Klux Klan in the early ‘20s so that “each race could flourish,” she could not stomach further association with anyone who could ally with lynchers. 

 

But positions like these limited her influence among Black leaders who hoped to mollify White suspicions. It could crop up even in organizations that she founded. She was once denied a speaking role at a convention of the National Association of Colored Women because delegates feared her radicalism would result in bad press. 

 

Wells threw her support to Alice Paul’s militant faction of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and with her friend Jane Adams interceded with the conservative national leadership of the organization to approve the giant Women’s Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. She marched with a contingent of Black women. 

 

Wells-Barnett did not mellow with age.  She remained opinionated, defiant, and radical.  Black leaders who hoped to curry favor with white politicians and business executive distanced themselves from her.

By the 1920s Wells was semi-retired from public life, having given up public lectures and most organizational duties. She could still be counted on to fire off a fiery article or editorial when an issue moved her. She mostly dedicated herself to her husband and family and to meticulous research for an autobiography she was writing. Occasionally she responded like an old fire horse to an alarm. 

 

 In 1930, disgusted that neither major party had any program to relieve the great distress in the Black community caused by the Great Depression, she ran as an independent for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly. She was one of the first Black women in the country to run for election at that level. Of course, she lost. 

 

When Wells died on March 25, 1931 at age 68 she was still working on her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. A first edition had been published in 1928, but she was working on a greatly revised and expanded version, backed by meticulous research when she died. As one writer put it “the book ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word.” 

 

Mid-rise buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority's Ida B. Wells Homes shortly after they opened just before World War II.  From a promising beginning they deteriorated into a crime and drug infested ghetto by the turn of the 21st Century and were razed.
 

Wells was widely mourned, especially in Chicago. She was memorialized most obviously by the massive Ida B. Wells Homes, a wall of high-rise public housing along with mid-rises and row houses built by the WPA in 1939-41 for the Chicago Housing Authority. Always intended for Blacks from the slums of the South Side, the Homes deteriorated into a gang violence ridden symbol of urban failure and were razed in stages between 2002 and 2011. Most of the residents never new a thing about the woman the buildings were named for. 

 

Wells was honored in 1989 with this Black Heritage USPS stamp.  In 2025 her memory is being erased from every possible Federal government web site.

 

Wells’s fame has been surprisingly limited for one so deeply involved in so many social issues over such a long and critical time. She mostly gets a footnote mention in histories for her anti-lynching crusades. The academic guardians of American history, at least as it is presented to impressionable high school and college students, favor far more moderate voices than that of Ida B. Wells. Perhaps they are still a little afraid of her after all this time. Certainly not surprising in a country where a third of the voting age population regards Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris as a raging radicals and America haters.