Texas Independence

Texas has been independent before. It declared independence on March 2, 1836, won it on the field at San Jacinto seven weeks later, and governed itself as a country until it joined the union at the end of 1845. That is the history most people mean when they search for Texas independence. It is also the reason the idea never went away.

The Revolution, 1835 to 1836

The fighting started at Gonzales on October 2, 1835. Mexican troops came to take back a small cannon lent to the town. The settlers raised a flag with the cannon painted on it and three words underneath: Come and Take It.

What began as a fight over the Mexican Constitution of 1824 turned into a fight for independence. Santa Anna had thrown out that constitution and taken power for himself. Texians and Tejanos who had been loyal Mexican citizens decided they would not live under him.

The winter of 1836 went badly. Santa Anna marched north with thousands of troops. On March 2, while the Alamo was under siege, delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Four days later the Alamo fell. On March 27, more than three hundred Texian prisoners were executed at Goliad on Santa Anna's orders.

Sam Houston retreated east for weeks, and plenty of his own men called him a coward for it. On the afternoon of April 21, 1836, he turned and attacked Santa Anna's camp on the San Jacinto River. The battle took about eighteen minutes. Santa Anna was captured the next day, and in May he signed the Treaties of Velasco ordering his army out of Texas.

The Republic of Texas, 1836 to 1845

For nearly ten years Texas was its own country. It had a president, a congress, a constitution, an army and a navy. It printed its own money and sent its own diplomats abroad. The United States recognized Texas in March 1837. France, Britain and the Netherlands followed.

It was not an easy decade. The Republic was broke most of the time, Mexico refused to recognize it, and its borders were in dispute from the day it was founded. But Texans ran their own affairs and answered to no one but themselves.

Annexation, 1845

Texas joined the union by choice. Congress passed a joint resolution offering annexation in March 1845. A Texas convention accepted it that July, Texas voters approved it, and Texas was admitted on December 29, 1845. The Republic's flag came down in Austin the following February.

That order of events matters. Most states were carved from federal territory and admitted by Congress. Texas was a sovereign country that agreed to join. Its people decided to enter the union through their own convention and their own vote.

Texas independence today

The principle in the 1836 declaration was never tied to a single year: a people have the right to govern themselves and to change their government when it stops serving them. The Texas Constitution still says so in Article 1, Section 2.

The Texas Nationalist Movement is the campaign for TEXIT, Texas independence decided by a peaceful vote of the people. In 1836 independence took a war. Now it takes a referendum. 685,310 Texans across all 254 counties have put their names to that vote.

If the obvious question is whether any of this is legal, the legal case is here, including what the Supreme Court actually said in Texas v. White. If it's whether Texas could stand on its own, the economic case is here.

Texas decided its future once in 1836 and again in 1845. Nothing in either decision said it could never decide again.