When was Texas an independent country, and how did that end?

Texas was a free and independent nation for almost a decade, from 1836 to 1845, recognized by the world, with its own president, congress, army, navy, currency, and foreign embassies. It did not lose that independence on a battlefield. It voted to set it aside and join the United States, and it can vote to resume it.

The Republic was real, and it was recognized

After winning independence at San Jacinto in 1836, Texas governed itself as the Republic of Texas for nine years. This was not a paper claim. The Republic elected four presidents, David G. Burnet, Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, and Anson Jones. It raised an army and a navy, issued its own money, ran its own post office, and was formally recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Texas kept a legation in Washington and an embassy in London. By every measure the world uses to define a country, Texas was one.

Independence ended by a vote, not a defeat

Here is the part the standard story leaves out. Texas did not stop being independent because it was conquered or because it failed. It chose to join the United States. A republic carrying debt from its war of independence and facing a hostile Mexico weighed the offer of annexation and accepted it. A convention drafted a state constitution, Texans ratified it by popular vote in October 1845, and the United States Congress completed annexation on December 29, 1845. Part of the bargain was that the federal government would assume up to ten million dollars of the Republic's bonded debt. Texas walked into the union deliberately, through its own institutions.

Anson Jones said it plainly

When the last president of the Republic, Anson Jones, lowered the flag of an independent Texas and handed power to the first state governor, he did not describe a country that had been beaten. He described one that had finished a chapter. "The final act in this great drama is now performed," he said. "The Republic of Texas is no more." A nation that ends a drama by its own hand can begin a new one the same way.

The status was set aside, not erased

This is why the Texas Nationalist Movement speaks of restoring independence rather than inventing it. The capacity for self-government did not vanish in 1845. The Texas Constitution still opens by declaring Texas "a free and independent State." Texas reduced the scope of its sovereignty by joining a union. It did not surrender the underlying right of its people to govern themselves, and that right is exactly what a modern vote would exercise.

What was done by consent can be revisited by consent

A country that became independent, was recognized, governed itself, and then chose by vote to enter a union holds a stronger claim than almost any independence movement on Earth. Texas is not asking to create something new and untested. It is asking whether the people of Texas, who once governed their own nation, wish to do so again. The mechanism is the same one used in 1845: the considered consent of Texans, expressed through their own government.

The bottom line

Texas was an independent, internationally recognized nation for nine years and gave that status up by choice, not by conquest. What a free people set aside by their own vote, a free people can take up again by their own vote.