ABSTRACT
Indian military power was broken in the lands claimed by the United States east of the Mississippi by 1 January 1815. While the Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the War of 1812, restored the status quo ante bellum and included an article reinstating the Indians of the Old Northwest to their situation in 1811, the reality remained a decisive defeat of armed Indian resistance to American expansion. The great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh had fallen at the Battle of the Thames on 5 October 1813; with him died the dream of panIndian unity in opposition to the United States. Embers of that dream were extinguished on 27 March 1814 when General Andrew Jackson destroyed an army of Creek militants, the southern Indians most receptive to Tecumseh’s appeal, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. From 1783 to 1815, Native American peoples had grappled with the problem of how to respond to the new American power. For decades their communities had been divided between those who sought peaceful accommodation and those who advocated armed defence of lands and rights. The debate was now ended, but accommodation without the alternative of force was a bankrupt policy as well. The way was now open for the removal of the Native American peoples from their homelands.1
