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U.S. offer accepted by Convention. OCTOBER 13. Annexation ordinance and state constitution submitted to the Texas voters for approval. (The vote tally on November 10, 1845, was 4,254 to 267 in favor of annexation; the total vote, compiled January 1, 1846, was 7,664 to 430 in favor of annexation.) DECEMBER 16.
- Narrative History of Texas Annexation
Narrative History of Texas Annexation. Texans voted in favor...
- Narrative History of Texas Annexation
Apr 1, 2023 · The Texas Annexation was a series of events that led to Texas joining the United States as the 28th state in the Union on December 29, 1845. The annexation of Texas was a direct cause of the Mexican-American War and contributed to the growing section divide over slavery that led to the Civil War in 1861. However, annexation expanded the economy ...
- 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?
The measure passed by a comfortable margin in the House of Representatives but by a narrow 27-25 vote in the Senate. In Texas, a convention ratified the agreement on July 4, and on December 29, 1845 the U.S. Congress accepted the state constitution, upon which Texas entered the Union as the 28th state.
The Texans forced Santa Anna to grant independence, but the Mexican government later reneged, claiming that the act had been coerced. In addition, the United States was unwilling to annex Texas despite a referendum vote in 1836 among Texas settlers overwhelmingly favoring annexation. Consequently, for almost a decade Texas was an independent ...
Jul 1, 2014 · Texas Annexation Timeline Fact 13: September, 1836: Texans vote overwhelmingly in favor of annexation and Sam Houston is named President of the Republic on October 22, 1836: Texas Annexation Timeline Fact 14: January 11, 1837: Resolution to recognize Texas is introduced in the U.S. Senate
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Narrative History of Texas Annexation. Texans voted in favor of annexation to the United States in the first election following independence in 1836. However, throughout the Republic period (1836-1845) no treaty of annexation negotiated between the Republic and the United States was ratified by both nations.
