The Battle of the Neches, the main engagement of the Cherokee War of 1838–1839 (part of the Texas–Indian Wars), took place on 15–16 July in 1839 in what is now the Redland community (between Tyler and Ben Wheeler, Texas). It resulted from the Córdova Rebellion and Texas President Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar's determination to remove the Cherokee people from Texas. Many Cherokee had migrated there from the American Southeast to avoid being forced to Indian Territory.
During Sam Houston's first term as president of Texas, while maintaining the Texas Rangers to police rogue Indians, Houston used diplomacy and presents to keep the peace on the frontier with the Comanche and Kiowa, and treated with his allies, the Cherokee. Houston had lived with the Cherokee and had earned his reputation among Native Americans for fairness and decency. The Cherokee were unhappy that the promises to give them title to their lands, which he had made them to secure their neutrality during the Texas Revolution, had not been fulfilled. Houston negotiated a settlement with them in February 1836, though he was unable to get the Legislature to ratify the portion of the treaty confirming the Cherokee's land titles. This was neither the first nor last time the legislature refused to ratify agreements Houston made with the Indians.
In 1838, letters on the person of counterrevolutionary, Manuel Flores addressing Cherokee Chiefs Big Mush and Chief Bowles was found of their colusion against the Texans. Coupled with the recent massacres of the Killough and Wood families, a commission was established to pay for their improvements they had constructed and for them to relocate to their assigned lands north of the Red River. The letter written in Spanish sought an arrangement with the Cherokee which would give them title to their land in exchange for assistance in joining a war of extermination against the Texians. Residents of Nacogdoches looking for a stolen horse found a camp of around one hundred armed Tejanos. Rather than allow the local militia to act, Houston (who was in Nacogdoches at the time) prohibited both sides from assembly or carrying of weapons. Local alcalde Vicente Córdova and eighteen other leaders of the revolt issued a proclamation with a number of demands to be met before their surrender. After being joined by around three hundred Indian warriors, they moved towards the Cherokee settlements.
Despite Houston's orders he should not cross the Angelina River to interfere, General Thomas Rusk sent on a party of 150 men under Major Henry Augustine, who defeated the rebels near Seguin, Texas. Despite the involvement of the Cherokee and the discovery of documents directly implicating Cherokee chief The Bowl on two separate Mexican agents over the next six months, Houston professed to believe the chief's denials and refused to order them arrested. In his several letters of reassurance to The Bowl during the unrest, Houston again promised them title to their land on the Neches River. Warriors believing their lands to be violated by the legal settlers then perpetrated the Killough massacre, killing eighteen.
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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