Since their first contacts with the Spanish in 1706, the Comanches had raided Spanish colonies in New Mexico and Texas, posing a significant threat to their continued existence. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Comanche threat to Spanish settlements had become critical. In the 1780s, several factors combined to give both the Spanish and Comanche incentives to negotiate peace treaties, leading to the treaties of 1785 and 1786.
These peace treaties resulted in a permanent peace between the Comanche in Comancheria and the Spanish colony of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, as well as a lengthy, albeit interrupted, peace between the Comanche and the Spanish in Texas. The treaties brought about significant changes in relations between the two sides, including expanded trade between the Spanish and the Comanche.
The historical consequence of these treaties was substantial and long-lasting. The agreements essentially transformed New Mexico into a protectorate of the Comanche from the 1780s until 1821. The treaties also enabled a combined effort by the Spanish and Comanche to defeat their mutual enemy, the Apache. This arrangement persisted until the success of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821, which ended the treaties and fundamentally altered the political landscape of the region.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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