The Birth of a Nation 93of occupied Indigenous lands by private speculators, was essential
to the US economy as a whole. The plantation economy required
vast swaths of land for cash crops, even before cotton was king,
leaving in its wake destroyed Indigenous national territories and
Anglo settlers who would fight and die driving out the Indigenous
communities yet remain landless themselves, moving on to the next
frontier to try again. US colonization produced the subsequent
hideous slavery-based rule of the Old Southwest, which would flour
ish for seven more decades. Unlike in the Ohio Country, the Wash
ington administration avoided force and in doing so alienated settlers
in the region. By preventing them from wiping out the Muskogees,
the federal government was seen as the enemy, just as the British au
thority had been for an earlier generation of determined settlers. But
that would soon change with the Muskogee War of 1813-14, nar
rated in the following chapter, in which, as Robert V. Remini puts it
in Andrew Ja ckson and His Indian Wars, "Tennessee frontiersman
Andrew Jackson, commanding both regular Army troops and fron
tiersmen, personally guaranteed that the Creeks would feel the full
brunt of total war." 23
During 18rn-15, then, two parallel wars were ongoing, one in
the Ohio Country-the Old Northwest-which ended with the de
fe at of the Tecumseh-led alliance, and the other the war against
the Muskogee Nation in 1813-14. Unlike the 1812 -15 war between
Britain and the United States, with which these wars overlapped,
the situation did not return to things being as they had been before,
but rather culminated in the elimination of Indigenous power east
of the Mississippi. US conquest was not determined by the defeat of
the British in battle in 1815, but rather by genocidal war and forced
removal. 24
US leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-indepen
dence period into the new republic, imprinting on the fledgling
federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the
continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic
cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define US war
making throughout the nineteenth century, with markers such as
the three US counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through
the Sand Creek Massacre of 186 4 to Wounded Knee in 1890. Early