The siege of Fort Sackville, also known as the siege of Fort Vincennes or the Battle of Vincennes, was an American Revolutionary War frontier battle fought in present-day Vincennes, Indiana. In February 1779, an American militia led by Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark defeated the British garrison of Fort Sackville commanded by Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton. Clark surprised the fort after a gruelling march from Kaskaskia, and following the execution of four Odawa captives, forced Hamilton's surrender.
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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