General Edmund Pendleton Gaines (1777-1849) had a lasting impact on Alabama and US history. Gaines was a hero of the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars as well as the Mexican War. He is also credited as being the officer who arrested fugitive US Vice President Aaron Burr in Alabama in 1807.
The times in which Gaines lived were exciting times. It was an era of big dreams and boundless ambition. People in this era took pride in being called Americans and it was a time when people weren’t afraid to rely on their abilities to propel them to greatness rather than relying on some government program.
It was during this era that a young Edmund Pendleton Gaines made a name for himself in Tennessee. Gaines educated himself in land surveying and the law while working on his father's farm.
At 22, Gaines served four years of militia service and earned himself an appointment as an ensign in the U.S. Army, Sixth Infantry. Soon he advanced to the rank of second lieutenant. In 1801, Gaines was assigned to a federal project to improve the Natchez Trace road. Gaines would spend the next three years surveying boundaries, mapping and constructing roads in the wilderness.
In 1804, Gaines was assigned to Fort Stoddert on the Old Federal Road in Alabama.
The fort was located only 30 miles from the Mississippi Territory's border with Spanish Florida. Gaines had his work cut out for him as he constantly worked to maintain peace among white settlers loyal to the United States, white settlers loyal to Great Britain, Native American nations with varying loyalties, and the territorial ambitions of Spanish Florida.
The above mentioned factions frequently clashed over commerce, criminal extradition, and land. Gaines successfully intervened to prevent hostilities on more than one occasion. In 1810 he foiled the plans of the Mobile Society, a band of 200 white male settlers who attempted to illegally annex Mobile from the Spanish.
In 1811, Gaines led a posse that arrested former vice-president Aaron Burr in what is now Washington County at St. Stephens. At the time, Burr was a fugitive wanted for stoking war with Spain, according to charges levied by Pres. Thomas Jefferson. After an informant revealed that Burr was hiding at a Washington County home, Gaines arrested him and transported Burr to Richmond, Virginia, where he testified at Burr's trial. As Burr was under heavy military escort, the group stopped at Burnt Corn, Alabama to spend the night.
Gaines served at Fort Stoddert until 1811, when he temporarily left the Army with plans to abandon his military career and practice law.
In 1812, at the outbreak of the War of 1812, Gaines re-enlisted as a major in the Eighth U.S. Infantry and was later promoted to lieutenant colonel and commander of the Twenty-fourth U.S. Infantry. Gaines served in many battles against the British forces along the Canadian frontier. In 1813, he was promoted to colonel and placed in command of the Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry and was named adjutant general under future U.S. President William Henry Harrison.
In March 1814, Gaines was promoted to brigadier general and took command of Fort Erie, near present-day Ontario, and defended it from an attack by 3,000 British in the Siege of Fort Erie on August 15, 1814. As the fighting raged, a British shell exploded in Gaines's quarters and left him seriously injured.
After recovering from his wounds, Gaines returned to the Southeastern frontier in 1816 and resumed his duties along the borders of Alabama, Georgia, and Spanish Florida. Gaines's headquarters were located at a stockade built in southern Georgia at a bend in the Chattahoochee River near the border with Alabama. The soldiers named the post Fort Gaines in honor of their general, and it eventually grew into the town of Fort Gaines, Georgia.
From 1816 until 1821, Gaines was involved in arbitrating disputes relating to the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which was signed by General Andrew Jackson and Creek leaders following the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Illegal settlements by white settlers and the forced cession of 23 million acres of Creek land led to violent clashes along the borders between Alabama and Georgia and Spanish Florida. Gaines's responsibility was to forcibly evict white squatters and Native Americans from lands to which they legally had no claim under the treaty regulations. Gaines also often corresponded with the governor of Spanish Florida to negotiate international policy along the Southeastern frontier.
More than twenty years later, in 1836, after the outbreak of the Texas Revolution, Gaines sent troops to assist Sam Houston and the Texan Army in their battle to take Texas, from Mexico. In 1846, Gaines issued calls for volunteer troops to assist General Zachary Taylor's forces on the Rio Grande during the Mexican-American War.
The federal government censured Gaines for what they considered to be his military adventurism for proceeding without orders from Washington. Gaines, now based in New Orleans, worked to influence military policy and infrastructural planning in the frontier regions.
Gaines died in New Orleans of cholera on June 6, 1849. He is buried in Mobile in the historic Church Street Cemetery. A number of places carry his name, including towns named Gainesville in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Fort Gaines, located at the mouth of Mobile Bay, is also named for Gaines.
Gaines had been at the pinnacle of his military fame in 1819 when the U.S. Government began construction of the fort on the east end of Dauphin Island Alabama. The fort was designed by military engineers to operate with Fort Morgan, a second masonry fortification on the west end of Mobile Point. Fort Gaines was located too close to the water and its builders encountered significant difficulties in its construction because of this mistake. It took more than forty years to complete the citadel. It was still not finished when Alabama seceded from the Union in 1861.
Confederates completed the fort in 1862 and manned it as one of their key defenses against a Union attack on the stubbornly defended Mobile Bay. Mobile was important because it was one of the few ports from which blockade runners were able to run past the Union blockade and make it Europe with trade goods such as cotton in exchange for guns and ammunition with which to fight the Federal invasion of the South. Yet the Union forces were planning a big attack.
That attack came in August of 1864, when 1,500 Union soldiers landed on Dauphin Island and advanced on Fort Gaines. Confederate troops skirmished with them as they slowly advanced, before falling back into the defenses of the main fort itself.
Two days later, on August 5, 1864, the fleet of Union Admiral David G. Farragut braved the barrages of shot and shell from Forts Gaines and Morgan and entered Mobile Bay. It was during this battle, epically called the Battle of Mobile Bay, that Farragut issued his immortal battle command, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
Yet the US Navy did not hold a monopoly on bravery that day. The soldiers in Fort Gaines watched as the famed Confederate ironclad C.S.S. Tennessee steamed out to engage Farragut's fleet in one of the greatest ship to ship battles of all time. The Tennessee was eventually captured and the fort held out only another three days, as Union ironclads moved up to close range and bombarded its masonry walls in a thunderous exchange of fire and brimstone which would have made the devil himself shutter. Following this exchange, the white flag of surrender rose over Fort Gaines on August 8, 1864.
Following the war, Fort Gaines continued to serve the US military. The fort was updated during the Spanish American War and was prepared to repel an attack from a European navy which never arrived. By the time of the Great Depression, local farmers grazed their cattle on the parade grounds of the old fort. In more modern times the fort has become a historic park and is open to the public.
Shadows and Dust Volume I and II is available at: http://stores.lulu.com/McKinley2971 or send $20 to PO Box 579 Atmore, AL 36504. Canoe: History of a Southern Town is available for purchase as well, as well as Shadows and Dust III: Legacies for $30.
