john page brother of martha page b. 1796 m. elijah dean?
Today I came across a Captain John H. Page who was at Fort Mitchell in Alabama in 1836 ("This So Remote Frontier: The Chattahoochee Country of Alabama and Georgia" by Mark E. Fretwell). Fort Mitchell, located in Russell County, is almost adjacent to Columbus, I believe. I can find no other mention of Capt. Page in my other sources or in a brief online search, but he was ordered to lead the first group of 1,600 Indians (captured after their uprising and burning of Roanoak in Stewart County) to Oklahoma on July 2, 1836.
We have looked for many years for the ancestors of my great+ grandmother Martha Page b. 1796, in Burke Co., GA, who married Major Elijah Dean b. 1794 in Washington Co., GA. They married in 1814 in Laurens Co, GA. Elijah was in the Georgia Militia until 1838 although he wrote and received permission not to go on the "trail of tears" that followed this earlier Alabama Indian removal. I suspect that Elijah and John were about the same age. By 1838, Fort Mitchell was in decline, Indians no longer a threat.
I wonder if Capt. John Page is possibly Martha's brother. If not, perhaps one of you other Page ancestors can link. While his place in Andrew Jackson's "Indian solution" is not one about which I would boast, I have read enough about the circumstances in the region in 1836 to realize that I also cannot cast blame on him. Tragically, settlement of the region had forced the Creeks into starvation, and unscrupulous land deals by whites had robbed them of their land. Desperate, the Indians, who formerly had lived peacefully, turned in terrorist acts on the increasing numbers of settlers. When General Jesup ordered this first removal, Ft. Mitchell was overflowing with thousands of Indian men, women, and children who had either "surrendered" or been captured. Another group of 900 went on July 9th of 1836; by the end of the year, Fretwell reports, 14,609 Creeks were removed from Alabama to the west with several thousand more sent in 1837.
Today, the people of the South have no collective guilt about the fate of those Indians whose land we occupy. By finding my forebearers and reading as much as I can about the lives they would have lived, I hope that I can reconcile some the conflicts I experience when I think about my place as a Southerner, daughter many times removed of those early settlers whose sons later fought against the Union. Perhaps the ambiguity will always remain, but I am feeling more balanced for having tried to walk in their shoes (or walk barefooted as is the case with the ancestor who walked home unshod from Appomatox to Alabama).
One thing I've learned: these families lived with war. From the Revolution through the War of 1812, the Creek War of 1813-1814, the Indian uprisings of the 1830's, and the Civil War, two or three generations (and everyone was too close kin for comfort) lived with the expectation of battle. It is no wonder than Southern sons went off to the Civil War with the notion that they would win! Their fathers always had!