Thomas S. Woodward

Selected Letters of General Thomas Woodward's Reminiscences Thomas S. Woodward

Indian scout, friend of General Andrew Jackson, and a slave owner, General Thomas S. Woodward was an active participant in the Muskogee Creek Indian Wars. During a two-year period, 1857-1859, he submitted letters to J. J. Hooker, editor of the Montgomery, Alabama Mail correcting errors, misinformation and the romanticized versions of the history of the period he found in Colonel Albert James Pickett's History of Alabama. The editor, with his permission, published those letters periodically, and after Woodward's death in December 1859, as a collection of reminiscences. Gifted with a remarkable memory, he wrote letters filled with first-hand details of the period that ended with the Indian Removal Act, by which the United States Government, under President Andrew Jackson, expropriated the remainder of Muskogee lands in Georgia and Alabama. In his letters he shows himself both ironic and amused at his own role in those events and does not apologize for his life. He records his admiration for some of those on both sides of the conflicts, Creeks, Mixed-blood, and Whites. As an historian, he was honest and fair, but a man molded by his time and place. And, as he says in his last letter published during his lifetime: "Peace to the Good and Brave."