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Apr 1, 2023 · The first issue arose when the Mexican Government refused to approve the treaties or recognize the independent Republic of Texas, claiming Santa Anna had been coerced into agreeing. In September, the people of Texas, fearing Mexican aggression, sought the protection of the United States.
- Randal Rust
- Overview
- The Republic of Texas
- Texas becomes the 28th state
- The Mexican-American War
- What do you think?
Quickly following Texan independence, the United States admitted Texas into the republic as a slave state.
Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. At that time, Mexico’s northern provinces included California, New Mexico, and Texas.
When Mexico founded the province of Texas in 1821, the land was very sparsely populated, so Texans actively recruited settlers from the United States to help grow the region’s population. Soon, Stephen Austin—after whom Austin, Texas is named—was selling plots of land to American settlers from a large land grant his father had received from the Mexican government; meanwhile, other settlers from the United States—especially from the American South—were moving to Mexican Texas.
By 1830, there were 7,000 settlers from the United States living in Mexican Texas. But tensions between the Mexican government and settlers from the United States grew as Mexico unsuccessfully attempted to halt further immigration and settlers pushed back against Mexican legal codes. These regulatory laws required those living in Mexico—including those living in Texas—to become Mexican, convert to Roman Catholicism, file legal documents in Spanish, and (after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829) end the practice of slavery. In reality, however, Mexico continued to allow settlers from the United States to bring slaves into the territory as “indentured servants.”
In 1835, settlers from the United States who lived in Texas formed a provisional government, and in 1836 called for independence. In turn, the Mexican government deployed the Mexican leader Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his troops into the region in an effort to regain political control.
The settlers in Texas from the United States, together with the active support of Tejanos (Texans of Spanish origin), sought to hold their ground against Santa Anna’s advancing troops.
In March of 1836, following a thirteen day siege, Santa Anna’s 5,000 troops attacked and killed 187 American and Tejano defenders at the battle of the Alamo--a mission-fortress outside San Antonio. Among the dead were Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and commander William Travis. “Remember the Alamo” became, thereafter, a battle cry.
During the years leading up to Texas’s becoming the 28th state, pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces battled over the issue of slavery’s expansion into Texas. Indeed, the inter-party and intra-party battles between and among Whigs and Democrats in Congress—and elsewhere across the nation—highlighted divisions between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces that would, in 1861, lead to the Civil War.
President John Tyler made the annexation of Texas a priority, and in the closing days of his presidency, Congress voted to make Texas a state—though it was not until December 1845 that, under President James K. Polk, Texas formally achieved statehood.
But the United States’ annexation of Texas was not the end of the story. In the spring of 1846, tensions mounted between the United States and Mexico, and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) started, in part, over a border dispute between the two countries. Mexico claimed the Nueces River to be Texas’s southern border, but the United States insisted the border lay further south at the Rio Grande River.
The Mexican-American War confirmed Texas’s southern border at the Rio Grande, indicating the United States victory. The United States also acquired California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.
How might American history have been different if Mexico had succeeded in keeping Texas as part of its country?
Why do you think settlers from the United States who had settled in Texas in the 1830s wanted to break free from Mexico and form their own country? Why did they want to become an official US state?
People also ask
When did Texas annex Mexico?
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Why did the US not want to annex Texas?
Why did Santa Ana disputed the existence of the Republic of Texas?
Santa Anna agreed to give Texas its freedom in exchange for his release, but the full government didn’t officially acknowledge the status of Texas as an independent country.
The Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States and admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. The Republic of Texas declared independence from the Republic of Mexico on March 2, 1836. It applied for annexation to the United States the same year, but was rejected by the United States Secretary of State.
Texas Annexation. After winning their independence from Mexico in 1836, Texans had voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining the United States. The measure faced opposition in the U.S. Congress, however, where moderates of both parties balked at the prospect of dramatically increasing the size of the southern slave empire. Antislavery societies ...
A treaty to annex Texas was submitted to the Senate on April 22, 1844. In opposition, Rep. Joshua Giddings, an Ohio Whig, denounced the prospect in a speech to the House on May 21, 1844. After pointing out the benefits of the balance of power being held by the North and West, he went on: But let us admit Texas, and we shall place the balance of ...
By 1844, the United States government had resisted the urge to annex the Republic of Texas for several years, but in 1844 that changed as President John
