1813
Battle of the Nations at Leipzig
For three days around Leipzig, half a million men from every corner of Europe fought the largest battle the continent had ever seen. Napoleon, outnumbered nearly two to one, broke and fled west. The German states changed sides. The grand coalition that would march on Paris was, at last, in motion.
Tecumseh Dies at the Thames
Tecumseh, the Shawnee war chief who had built a pan-tribal confederacy against American expansion, was killed fighting beside his British allies at the Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada. His body was never found. With him died the last real chance of organized indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi.
Vitoria Ends French Spain
Wellington's polyglot army caught King Joseph's retreating column at Vitoria and looted it down to the coronation silver. Napoleon's brother fled over the Pyrenees in a carriage that had been a treasury. Beethoven wrote a noisy battle symphony. Spain was free; the way into France lay open. The captured baggage included a collection of Spanish old masters that Wellington kept and that still hangs at Apsley House.
Horseshoe Bend
Andrew Jackson's Tennessee militia trapped a thousand Red Stick Creek warriors in a loop of the Tallapoosa River and killed almost all of them. The treaty that followed took twenty-three million acres from the Creeks. The campaign launched Jackson into national fame and dispossessed a people. The South, in two senses, would never be the same.
Lützen and Bautzen
In May, Napoleon fought two hard battles in Saxony against the Russo-Prussian coalition and pushed them back - but at a cost he could not afford. Marshal Bessières and the emperor's childhood friend Duroc were among the dead. It was the last of the old Napoleonic spring campaigns, and the last months in which he could dictate anything.