The decisive battle of the Creek War, fought March 27, 1814 on the Tallapoosa River, Alabama. The Red Stick Creek had fortified a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river with a log breastwork stretching across the neck, sheltering nearly 1,000 warriors and hundreds of civilians on the peninsula. Jackson's artillery failed to breach the breastwork, but his Cherokee allies swam the river and attacked from behind, stampeding the defenders. Jackson's infantry then stormed the breastwork directly. The result was a massacre—800 warriors killed, some still fighting while riddled with bullets. One young soldier named Sam Houston was wounded three times.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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