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in the regular army of the United States and made commander of the Seventh Military District, which included Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Territory.8 Meanwhile, many of the surviving Red Sticks found sanctuary in Spanish Florida or blended into the rest of the Creek population. Bands of starving Creeks surrendered throughout the spring and summer of 1814. One of those who personally surrendered to Jackson was the Creek leader Chief Red Eagle. Surprisingly, Jackson was so impressed with his courage and acceptance of defeat that he pardoned him and turned him free. Red Eagle, living by his Christian name William Weatherford, became a respected gentleman planter in what soon became Alabama, and in his later years occasionally visited Jackson at the Hermitage, where they discussed racehorses and their former days as opposing warriors.9

Most Creeks, however, did not fare as well as Red Eagle. On August 9, 1814, Jackson forced the Creeks to sign a treaty at Fort Jackson. In punishment for daring to oppose the invasion of their ancestral lands, Jackson ordered the Creeks to cede half of their tribal domain—23 million acres in all—in southern Georgia and the eastern Mississippi Territory to the United States.10 In this same pact the Creeks also agreed to vacate the southern and western regions of what became Alabama, where, within five years after the treaty was signed, white settlers had taken over the entire region. This extreme act of retribution applied not only to Red Sticks but also to the entire Creek Nation, even those Indians who had fought on Jackson’s side. “What Jackson had done had the touch of genius,” noted the historian Robert Remini. “He had ended the war by signing a peace treaty with his allies! Jackson converted the Creek civil war into an enormous land grab that insured the ultimate destruction of the entire Creek Nation.”11

The Treaty of Fort Jackson was the end not just of the Creek Nation but of all other southeastern Indian tribes. For although the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws also fought for the United States against the renegade Creeks, these tribes, too, were soon pressured to give up their lands. Within twenty-five years they would be gone from their ancestral homes. A long-established way of life for these tribes ended as white newcomers steadily settled the rural lands of the South.

“Jackson’s demands were extortionate and a shameful betrayal of his former Creek allies,”12 wrote John Finger in his chronicle of Tennessee. “Of the thirty-five chiefs who finally signed the infamous Treaty of Fort Jackson, only one was a former Red Stick. Millions of acres of prime agricultural land—cotton land—now became available to white settlers and speculators. Frontiersman everywhere cheered Old Hickory for his feats on both the battlefield and the council ground.”

Jackson’s victory ceased hostilities in only one theater of the War of 1812. Land and sea battles continued elsewhere, and in late August, a British expeditionary force brazenly marched unopposed into Washington, D.C. President James Madison and his apparently imperturbable wife, Dolley, had to flee the White House, which the invaders set ablaze along with the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and most other public buildings, as well as a number of private residences.13

Andrew Jackson had hated Great Britain ever since he was a boy during the Revolutionary War and was slashed on his head and hand by a Red Coat sword after refusing to clean a British officer’s muddy boots.14 While Washington, D.C., smoldered, Jackson put out a call for new Tennessee volunteers to help drive the British from Florida, where they planned to incite and equip surviving Red Sticks and other Creeks who refused to accept the punitive treaty Jackson had concocted. “I owe to Britain a debt of retaliatory vengeance,” Jackson wrote to his wife. “Should our forces meet I trust I shall pay the debt—she is in conjunction with Spain arming the hostile Indians to butcher our women & children.”15

At Kentuck, Crockett caught wind of the latest call to arms. “Soon