A battle fought here on November 30, 1817, helped assure that Florida would become part of the United States. Angered by an attack by American soldiers on the Lower Creek village of Fowltown near today's Bainbridge, Georgia, hundreds of Seminole, Miccocukee, Red Stick Creek, and Maroon warriors ambushed a U.S. Army supply boat. Lt. Richard W. Scott of the 7th Regiment of U.S. Infantry and his 40-man company were surprised as they tried to move their keelboat against a swift current that pushed it near the riverbank. Scott and many of his men fell in the first volley of musket and rifle fire. Others fought back with muskets and a small swivel cannon, but the warriors waded into the river and stormed the boat, ending the fight in brutal hand to hand combat. This was the first U.S. defeat of the Seminole Wars, and it became important in negotiations with Spain that helped bring about the transfer of Florida to the United States in 1821. Homathlemico, leader of the Native American forces in the battle, was a refugee Red Stick Creek chief who fled Alabama at the end of the Creek War of 1813-1814 and was captured and executed by U.S. forces in 1818. Abraham was a Maroon fighter during the First Seminole War who had served in the British Colonial Marines on the Apalachicola River in 1814-1815 and became an important Black Seminole leader and advisor for many years. The attack was retaliatory: under direct orders from President James Monroe's administration, Maj. Gen. Edmund P. Gaines ordered U.S. troops to carry out two raids on the Creek village of Fowltown on November 21-23, 1817, and the soldiers were ordered to kidnap the chief, Neamathla, to hold him hostage until his people agreed to evacuate lands taken from them by the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Elizabeth Stewart, the wife of a U.S. soldier, was the sole female survivor of the attack and was reunited with her husband after nearly six months of captivity; after his death in later years, she married John Dill of Fort Gaines, Georgia, where two of her homes still stand.