Texas secession movements
Texas secession movements, also known as the Texas independence movement or Texit, refers to both the secession of the U.S. state of Texas during the American Civil War as well as activities of modern organizations supporting such efforts to secede from the United States and become an independent sovereign state.
The U.S. Constitution does not specifically address the secession of states, and the issue was a topic of debate after the American Revolutionary War until the American Civil War, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that states strictly cannot unilaterally secede except through revolution or the expressed consent of the other states.
Texas was formerly called the Republic of Texas, a sovereign state for nine years prior to the Texas annexation by the United States. Accordingly, its sovereignty was not recognized by Mexico although Texas defeated the Mexican forces in the Texas Revolution, and authorities in Texas did not actually control all of its claimed territory.
Modern secession efforts have existed in the state at least since the 1990s and focused first on the Republic of Texas organization which ultimately splintered into several organizations, including the Texas Nationalist Movement. Recent discussions between Texas Republican Party representatives renewed talks of secession after the decision of the Supreme Court in Texas v. Pennsylvania, which declined to hear the case regarding attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election due to lack of standing.
Secession in the United States
Discussion about the right of U.S. states to secede from the union began shortly after the American Revolutionary War. The United States Constitution does not address secession. Each of the colonies originated by separate grants from the British Crown and had evolved relatively distinct political and cultural institutions prior to national independence. Craig S. Lerner has written that the Constitution's Supremacy Clause weighs against a right of secession, but that the Republican Guarantee Clause can be interpreted to indicate that the federal government has no right to keep a state from leaving as long as it maintains a republican form of government.The question remained open in the decades before the Civil War. In 1825, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "If today one of these same states wanted to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be quite difficult to prove that it could not do so. To combat it, the federal government would have no evident support in either force or right." However, Joseph Story wrote in 1830 in Commentaries on the Constitution that the document foreclosed the right of secession. On the eve of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln argued that states were not sovereign before the Constitution but instead they were created by it.
Current Supreme Court precedent, in Texas v. White, holds that the states cannot secede from the union by an act of the state. More recently, in 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia stated, "If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede."
Republic of Texas (19th century)
Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836, spurred on primarily by American settlers in the former Mexican territory against the government of Santa Anna.After the final engagement at San Jacinto in 1836, there were two different visions of the future of Texas: one as a state of the United States and the other as an independent republic. Sam Houston promoted the first, as he felt that the newly independent country, lacking hard currency and still facing threats from Mexico, could not survive on its own. The other was promoted by second Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar, who felt that it was Texas's destiny to be a nation that extended from the Louisiana border to the Pacific Ocean. For this reason, Lamar is considered the father of Texas nationalism.
The Republic under Lamar incurred large-scale debt, and suffered from a poor economy and inadequate defenses, which led to the annexation of Texas into the United States in 1845. Since then, the state's time as an independent nation has been the basis of a lasting sense of national identity.
Secession from the U.S., 1861
The history of Texas in the Civil War has distinctions from the rest of the South, in part because of its history of being independent previously. Much of Texas's dissatisfaction was not only tied to opposition to Lincoln and his view of states' rights, but also because they did not feel that Washington had lived up to promises of inclusion into the country as part of annexation. In 1861, Sam Houston still strongly supported remaining in the United States primarily for economic and military reasons. However, those promoting secession used not only elements from U.S. history such as the American Revolution and the Constitution, but also the Texas Revolution and elements from the history of the Republic of Texas.On February 1, 1861, delegates to a special convention to consider secession voted 166 to 8 to adopt an ordinance of secession which cited the institution of slavery as the primary cause of secession. The ordinance was ratified by a popular referendum on February 23, making Texas the seventh and last state of the Lower South to do so.
Some wanted to restore the Republic of Texas, but an identity with the Confederacy was embraced. This led to the replacement of Texas themes for the most part with those of the Confederacy, including religious justification given in sermons, often demanded by petitioners. The transference to the Stars and Bars was in the hope of achieving the inclusion perceived by some to be denied by Washington. However, that shift was never complete. Clayton E. Jewett wrote in Texas in the Confederacy: An Experiment in Nation Building that its identity remained somewhat separate from the rest of the Confederacy. James Marten wrote in Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856–1874 that it battled between loyalty to the Confederacy and dissent and its ambivalence may have been enough to assure Southern defeat.
During the war, Texas was spared most of the actual fighting, with only Galveston seeing any military engagement with Union forces. However, the war did take a serious toll in the way of chronic shortages, absence of men at home to run the economy, military setbacks and fear of invasion. Although Lincoln recognized Texas's history as an independent nation, his definition of the Union meant that Texas forever ceded this to be subject to the Constitution.
From the Civil War to the 1990s
After the end of the Civil War, Texans maintained a "rebel" or Confederate identity instead of a completely Texan one as a way of still defying the United States. After the Civil War, it provided a haven for others in the Confederacy leaving claimed devastation. From that time to the present, a "Lost Cause" mythology has continued in Texas and other areas of the South. However, for the most part, overt discussion of the right of states to secede ended, replaced by another mythology based on the indivisibility of the territory.This did not end Texas's identity as at least somewhat different from the rest of the United States. Unlike southern states, Texas began emphasizing its cowboy heritage and connection with the U.S. Southwest, even influencing the rest of the U.S. identity in the 20th century. For many Texans, the history of the Republic of Texas is considered a time of independence and self-determination often in contrast to interference by the federal government in Washington. Texas requires a course in the state's history in the seventh grade where these ideas can also be found.
In the 1990s, Texas began to use the slogan "Texas. It's Like a Whole Other Country" especially in domestic ads for tourism, and still can be seen today. However, public imagination remains split on the visions of Texas as state and nation that Houston and Lamar had in the 19th century. The two can appear as a conflict between rural and urban Texans but the Lamar vision can be found in the cities as well. Texas did not join in festivities for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War as it was thought that the commemoration would have reopened old unhealed wounds.
1990s to present
There have been efforts to promote Texas secession in the state at least since the 1990s. At this time, Richard Lance McLaren founded the Republic of Texas organization based on his property within the Davis Mountains Resort in Jeff Davis County, becoming the most active and influential secession group at the time. Essentially the organization claimed that the United States annexed Texas illegally and considered it to be held captive. The organization held itself out as an alternative government, based on the principle of very limited powers.McLaren had both supporters and enemies. His supporters generally believed that globalization was a threat to constitutional rights and against Christian principles. Tactics of the group included filing liens against properties, disavowing state and federal authorities, and opening an "embassy". McLaren's legal filings were so numerous that the county clerk gave them a separate cabinet. Members of the Republic of Texas group listed grievances with the U.S. government, such as accusing the government of a corrupt judicial system, paganism, and of creating illegal treaties and illegitimate agencies. Members of the group also stated that the U.S. government had set itself above the people and had exercised its global influences unlawfully against the Constitution. The Republic of Texas members placed emphasis on the Branch Davidian incident near Waco as an example of all that was wrong with the U.S. government.
In the summer of 1996, injunctions and other court proceedings against McLaren were well underway. In July of that year, McLaren held a press conference a block away from the state courthouse in Austin stating that he refused to appear because he did not recognize the legitimacy of the court. McLaren was jailed for a month by a federal judge for failing to show in court. After his release, McLaren's rhetoric grew stronger.