Be aware of my creed, he warned. “An Eye for an Eye, Toothe for Toothe and Scalp for Scalp.”

From The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory by Robert V. Remini.  Page 15.

He had brought, to use his own words, “retaliation and vengeance” to the Creeks. And Great Britain and Spain, those two despicable allies, deserved no less. “I owe to Britain a debt of retaliatory vengeance,” he told Rachel, “should our forces meet I trust I shall pay the debt—she is in conjunction with Spain arming the hostile Indians to butcher our women & children.”

Although the United States was not technically at war with Spain, and therefore any attack on it or its possessions would constitute an act of unauthorized aggression, Jackson had no compunction against invading Spanish Florida, because Spain cooperated with the British and Indians and indeed supplied the Indians with arms and ammunition. In addition, many of the leaders of the Red Sticks had escaped into Florida, where they continued to plot against the United States. So Jackson wrote to the Spanish governor in Pensacola and instructed him on his duties. There are “refugee banditti from the creek nation swarming into Florida,” he wrote Don Matteo González Manrique, and “drawing rations from your government and under the drill of a British officer.” Such renegades as Peter McQueen, Josiah Francis (Hilis Hadjo), and other hostiles constituted “ a “matricidal band for whom your christian bowls seem to sympathise and bleed so freely.” They should be arrested, confined, and tried for their crimes, he insisted. The United States would not tolerate any attempt to protect them. Be aware of my creed, he warned. “An Eye for an Eye, Toothe for Toothe and Scalp for Scalp.”