I've been pondering how American history would've changed if Texas hadn't joined the Union. I know it's a moot point but I think it could've had some pretty far reaching consequences if Texas could've stuck it out for even another 20 years.

First, the Mexican war would've been pushed off another 20-30 years if it had happened at all and 2nd it would have impacted the civil war.

I think there would have been two scenarios, either Texas' population continued to surge with immigrants from the South and it would've become slowly more prosperous before 1861. Population would've probably risen faster if Texas stayed independent as land grant size drastically went down after annexation as the state didn't need the money to keep functioning.

OR Texas would've become a British protectorate. Either situation would've been bad for the Union in the civil war as it would've made it much easier for the South to have run the blockade.

I think the Union would've had to also fight Texas to prevent it being a smuggling conduit , which it largely left alone other than a blockade and a few coastal raids, if it wanted to defeat the South. also a lot of Texans would've probably volunteered for the south even it Texas wasn't part of it.

If Texas had become a British protectorate it probably wouldn't have taken much to get them into the war if Texas had been attacked/blockaded.

We could still own slaves.

I think she had 2 choices, Mexico or the United States.

And there was also the Comanche problem, which wasn't finally resolved until 1875 via the use of Federal troops. Texas' effectiveness in dealing with that issue varied greatly over the years.

...it would be known as Northern Mexico instead of Tejas

Mexico would have owned it eventually

Yes the Comanches were Hell on Wheels and in fact were a major reason that the Mexicans invited the Anglos to settle there in the first place.
The Mex just couldn't effectively fight the Comanche and in fact, the Comanche raided 200 miles all the way to the Rio Grande and burned Laredo to the ground one day, just for the hell of it.
The Mex/Spanish built a new city on the other side of the river and that is why we now have Nuevo Laredo.

And the Anglos fought well against the Comanche but even given the massive superiority of firepower, with the Colt six shooter, it still took 40 years and Federal intervention to finally conquer the mighty Comanche. They were certainly the most powerful tribe in North America, what a bunch of bad asses. Probably 30,000 members of the tribe in 1830 when the war vs. Anglos began.

Harry Truman was fond of telling a story that ended, "A school boy's hindsight is always better than a general's foresight".

The republic was slave free, it was a requirement of the united states that we become a slave state to gain admission to the union

Read books.



Travis

You are less than bright.





Travis

The wall would be built on the northern Texas border.

No idea where you're getting that from.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yps01

In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves. The Texas Revolution assured slaveholders of the future of their institution. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836) provided that slaves would remain the property of their owners, that the Texas Congress could not prohibit the immigration of slaveholders bringing their property, and that slaves could be imported from the United States (although not from Africa).

In the Republic of Texas you weren't even allowed to free your own slaves without species dispensation from the RoT Congress.

Given those protections, slavery expanded rapidly during the period of the republic. By 1845, when Texas joined the United States, the state was home to at least 30,000 slaves.

Birdwatcher

One good thing I can think of is that Austin wouldn't be overrun with California liberals!

Why didn't the Texans just take over Mexico when they had Santa Anna? They were pulling the short hairs at the time!

Pull your head out and look around, that statement is just plain ignorant!

If you cut Alaska into quarters, California would be the 5th largest state.

Most of the big land grants awarded to Anglos were well to the east, east of the plains. By 1835 there were more than 35,000 Anglos in Texas, few lived within reach of Comanche raiding parties.

Mexico's big impetus for inviting in Americans was that Texas lay several hundred miles north of where most of the Mexican people lived. In 1835 there were around eight million people in Mexico, but only 7,000 Mexican citizens lived in far-off Texas, so few in fact that Texas had been administratively lumped into an entity called Coahila y Texas.

Texas did however, lie right on the doorstep of the United States, directly in the path of expansion.

No way that Mexico could stop illegal immigration into Texas from the US, instead they just sought to control it by attempting to bring in educated, wealthy Americans willing to accept Mexican citizenship in return for generous tracts of land. In addition to keeping the riffraff out, these people would also generate revenues for the Mexican government through applied tariffs. It didn't work on either count.



The introduction of the revolver had very little long-term effect on Plains warfare against Comanches wherein the problem had always been just getting close enough to catch sight of them let alone plug them with handguns. The queen of battle on the Plains had always been and would continue to be the rifle.

Indeed the largest single bloodletting against Comanches committed by Anglos, one of the major massacres of our whole history of the West, was when in October of 1840 an estimated 180 Comanches were killed at their winter camp on the San Saba after being surprised by 90 Texians under the command of Ranger Caption John Moore, guided in by Lipan Apaches. That feat was accomplished mostly with longrifles.

The real crux of the issue though was that only a small minority of Texans relative to the whole state population lived within reach of Comanche raiding parties, and even fewer ever took to the field against Comanches.

By 1860, after getting hammered by massive epidemics and whittled down by constant low-level skirmishing there were less than 10,000 Comanches remaining, or about 2,000 men of combat age at best. By that time the population of Texas was around 600,000 of whom more than 400,000 were free. That translates to around 80,000 Texan males of combat age, a great many of whom owned revolvers, rifles and horses.

Just a handful of these ever took to the field against horse Indians, instead Texans for the most part left it to the Federal Government to fight Comanches, and so it was that the relentless Ranald McKenzie became the hammer that finally drove the last Comanches from the Plains in '74.

The last wild Comanches that is, by that time MOST Comanches were settled in the Indian Territory and heavily into cattle ranching, which is how they could be in a position to collectively trade 30,000 head of cattle to the US Army in New Mexico in 1873.

Birdwatcher

Sam Houston , a Texas hero, was ostracized for refusing to support succession. JFK's book, "Political Courage"I believe, gives an overview of that story from Kennedy's perspective.

I think I am a fifth generation Texan from the side that arrived the latest. They were a bunch that showed up in the Panhandle as Comanches were leaving. I think they arrived to mass cattle ranches in at least one case and preach the tenets of Methodist Christianity in another. That group rode with Goodnight. As a a youth I discussed Texas and its history with a direct relative that new Goodnight and many of the old-timers of Goodnight's time.

Another branch were German Catholics and people from the current Czech Republic but of German / Austrian descent. I suspect from history books that they were Union sympathizers, but like most good Germans, they don't talk about nonsense like that today. The German pragmatist attitude is that is long past and better to think about practical matters of the present.

The third group were Texas Revolution period settlers that migrated to NC from Europe in the pre-18th century era. I suspect they were Confederate sympathizers, but don't know for sure.

I think my family reflects a cross-section of the state at that time and I suspect it was highly divided in Texas, like today.

Thank the Lord of all that slavery is no more. At least as sanctioned by the law of the land because it is unfortunately alive and well in Texas illegally.

Better questions;;;

What if Jefferson hadn't bought Louisiana?

What if Seward hadn't sprung for Alaska?

What if gold wasn't found in Northern Georgia?

I mean,,, since we're in the middle of "what it's".

Desertmuledeer:

"Thank the Lord of all that slavery is no more. At least as sanctioned by the law of the land because it is unfortunately alive and well in Texas illegally."

What? I am in Houston right now I don't see any slaves.
What?

What if Superman was a Caddo?

Which Caddo! Anadarko, Neche, keechi, Bidai, Nebedache, Nachito, Adai, ????

And the list goes on!

There would be no Fire!!

Oh, they'd be a helluva fire!

The Colt revolver was a significant factor in the defeat of the Comanches by the Rangers.
This often involved close quarters combat on horseback. The Comanche had bows and arrows, their famous lances of course, and some muzzle loading rifles.

A Texas Ranger with two fully loaded Colts was more than even the Comanche warrior could handle.

We gave it our best shot about 10 years after the Alamo went down, it was called the Mexican War.

We won, we occupied Mexico City and everything.

Be careful what you wish for....

There were around ten million Mexicans in 1848 and we didn't beat all of THEM. Guerilla is a Spanish word; step out of your camp if you were an American and your throat was cut, plus our supplies could only arrive if sent in armed convoys. Then enlistments started expiring and diseases broke out.

If the Mexican government had been a little less venal we would have just evaporated. Instead they accepted $15 million American dollars from us. In return for that 15 million they ceded California and all claims on Texas and we got to declare victory and go home.

Twelve years later again Texas Governor Sam Houston did his very best to start a war with Mexico in the vain hope that such a war would unite a nation (us) teetering on the verge of Secession.

That attempt failed, but ironically it has been said that the only thing that can unite Mexico is the threat of an American invasion.

Birdwatcher

Read "RIP" Ford's Texas, the collected memoirs of Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford.

Captain Ford spent more time in the field fighting Indians than just about any other White man who lived to tell about it. Most of this against Comanches.

Ford specifically states that the revolver and the Comanche bow were at a rough parity in combat. The real proof is that there was no sudden increase in the Comanche body count subsequent to the introduction of the revolver, which was just a handgun after all.

Which is part of the reason why Ford did almost all of his own Indian fighting with rifles.

And of course the bigger picture was that the proportion of Comanches killed by Texans relative to the numbers felled by epidemics was miniscule.

Birdwatcher

there are so many ver. 2.0 wars looming.

Some serious ominous stuff they all are.

The kind that taught Charles Goodnight woodcraft in the Brazos River bottoms when he was a kid.

Maybe we can make that Caddo a Jedi instead.

If Texas had been assumed by Mexico, would the US have tried to take all of Mexico?

Caddo Jedi????
Hmmmmm???


I think you're onto something!

Bidai Jedi rhymes.

They were the band that a Mexican doctor innoculated for smallpox according to the journal of Mier e' Teran!

Stephen L. Moore in his surprisingly good "Savage Frontier" series has it that the Ranging Company out of Parker's Fort the year before the place was sacked captured an Indian and tried to infect that man with smallpox before releasing him to infect his people. The outcome of that episode not known.

Maybe they had caught one of Teran's crowd.

It was the Mexican Army that tore down the Alamo in the spring and summer of 1836 on their way out after the capture of Santa Anna, they did that so that they wouldn't have to take it again when they came back.

I read somewhere recently that they almost did return in 1837, a force of 10,000 troops assembled, but that internal political chaos prevented that force from ever being sent. If it had been sent the Second Texas Revolution woulda had another chapter or two though undoubtedly we would have won in the end by a tidal wave of immigration. In 1836 the American-born in Texas already outnumbered Spanish-speaking Tejanos five to one.

So it was the Mexican Army didn't return until 1842, twice, the second time a 1,500 man Mexican Army occupying San Antonio, the largest city in Texas, for three weeks. This to fulfill a pledge by the returned-to-office Presidente Santa Anna to redeem Mexican honor by taking back Texas.

Sending just 1,500 men in 1842 was Quixotic at best on account of there were 100,000 American/Texians in Texas by that time, already three times as many as there had been in 1836.

Still, that army was able to march right in unopposed until gathering militia threatened to cut it off, the army withdrawing back across the Rio Grande after two skirmishes on the outskirts of town.

But when Santa Anna did that in 1842 it made obvious just how defenseless the RoT really still was, six years after independence.
If we didn't annex it, somebody else would. So we did, precipitating the Mexican War.

Would annexation have taken place even if Santa Anna hadn't sent that invasion force? Hard to say.

Birdwatcher

Numbers.

We swept across North America relatively unopposed on account of 90% or more of the Indian population died from epidemics upon contact, meanwhile our own population at that time was growing at a rate rivaled today only by present-day Kenyans.

The CDC has estimated that 20 million Indians died in epidemics in Mexico alone in the 50 years following the arrival of Cortez. By the time of our Second Texas Revolution 300 years later the surviving population of Mexico was about as resistant as our own in that regard.

Occupying a country still occupied by 8 to 12 million still very much alive Mexicans woulda been a whole different ballgame than moving in post-epidemic.

Birdwatcher

Ah, ha. So, Texas didnt let in any of those African bros. Not a bad move.

Ya, and interesting given the fact that before the revolution Galveston had been a prime place for smuggling African slaves into North America, at enormous profit given the demands of the exponentially expanding cotton and sugar cane concerns in the Deep South.

Again from recollection, the three Bowie brothers had made $65,000 this way (equivalent of about $4 million today) and Fannin himself, in the employ of monied interests, had brung in 200 African slaves in one shipment.

I do not know why this trade was considered undesirable by the 49 delegates to the Independence Convention of '36, most of whom were wealthy planters.

Birdwatcher

Quite possibly the case. Correct time period and less than 100 miles from the Bidai area of occupation.

Good God NO

My wife still owns one!!!!

That problem would have been a lot easier if they could have found a way to stop the Comancheros from supplying them with guns.

All the focus on Texas and everyone forgets California.
Polk and his buddies wanted California and everything "from sea to shining sea" as part of American Destiny. Texas was an excuse. California was going to happen.
California was a hotbed where "illegal aliens" from the, gasp!, United States, overthrew the Mexican officials and declared independence.
Major Fremont and US soldiers took over the California Republic, though Fremont was found guilty of Mutiny for annexing California to the US and declaring himself Military Gov without orders to do so.
The Marines landed, all but useless Baja became US territory. The US won the Mexican War. President Polk pardoned Fremont for doing the US a favor.
Fremont became the first anti-slavery Republican candidate for President of the US before Honest Abe.

Give it all back to Mexico, I've no use for any of those states.

The main force that defeated the Comanche was simple attrition. Even when there was "a bunch" of them, relatively speaking, there weren't really that many when compared to the numbers of Anglos and Mexicans that opposed them. Both the Anglos and Mexicans had an unrelenting supply of replacements, which the Comanche did not have. Comanche women had short, hard lives. Death came early in most cases. Due to the lifestyle they led on horseback the rates of stillbirths and infant mortality was high. That was one reason the Comanches regularly took slaves into the tribe, to bolster their failing population numbers. Introduced (possibly intentionally) sickness to which they had no immunity made this problem infinitely worse.

Rip Ford was one of the few, and probably the first, to really figure out how to fight Comanches. Most tried to fight on foot against the mounted Comanche, which primarily resulted in a defensive battle. Rip taught his men to fight from horseback, the way the Comanche did. They carried minimal gear, and rode fast and light. That was something the Comanche was not used to from the Anglos. It was also something the Anglos forgot, and re-learned several times in the generations of warfare against the Comanche.

The Colt might not have been any better than the bow, but it did allow men to fight from the back of a horse and have more than one shot. The long rifles for sure played their part in set battles, the range and accuracy was devastating when it could be employed. But the Colt allowed them to fight mounted as well, on equal terms with the bow, which had been lacking. Basically it allowed the Texans both sides of the coin, and not just one side.

Texas was just the excuse for the mexican war which probably would've eventually occurred anyway.

I think Texas itself would've looked much different if it had held out for another 15-20 years as an independent. I doubt it would've been able to establish any type of permanent presence south of the Nueces but at the same time Mexico's internal politics were such that it was unlikely to mount a genuine reconquest for a couple decades, most likely just little raids/excursions like they did in 1842.

The Comanches are largely overstated, most of the population of Texas at that time was in East Texas that never had to deal with Comanches. Comanche attacks get a lot of publicity because they could be devastating but they weren't just real widespread throughout the state.

Annexation probably prolonged the Comanche wars. Policy was taken from Washington and there were conflicts between the state and the Feds regarding the Feds protecting those that went to reservations from Texan attacks. If Texas had stayed it alone, they probably would've continued Lamar' policy of leave the state or annihilation.

The Texas-Mexico border makes up 1,254 miles of the 1,900-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. This amounts for 66% of the entire border. If Texas was independent, they have a big bill for the border fence!

Two comments regarding posts in this thread:

1) I recall reading somewhere that Lincoln had urged Sam Houston to promote Texas seceding from the U.S. and reverting to an independent republic, not joining the Confederate States. I have always thought this suggestion inconsistent with the official position by Lincoln that secession was illegal. However, he suggested it as a way to keep Texas from joining the Confederacy. Hmmm...It is illegal to leave the U.S. and we will force you at the point of a bayonet to remain, but it is OK for you to do so as long as you do not join the Confederacy? Note that this is quite some time before the start of the war.

2) Interestingly, not only was it illegal to import African slaves into the Republic of Texas. It was also stipulated in the Confederate States Constitution that the importation of African slaves was prohibited. In both the Republic of Texas and the Confederate States of America the importation of slaves from U.S. states and territories was legal.

Comanches one must remember we're relative newcomers to Texas as well.

In the late 18th and early 19th century there was an pretty robust trade in horses and mules going on between white (American) traders from Louisiana and Mississippi. All right under the Spaniards nose. The Comanche were the priemere horse and mule raisers on the southern plains. They basically traded with everyone.

One interesting side story to the trade is the story of the "Texas Iron".

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rzt01

Ya, a generally ignored side of the story very well presented in the work Comanche Empire by a Finnish Prof working out of UC Berkeley...

https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History/dp/0300151179

...a must-read for anyone interested in Western history.

Concerning the trade in livestock across the Plains, the role of the Mexicans shouldn't be ignored either. In 1840 during the Great Comanche Raid, when the people of Linnville on the coast saw the Comanches approaching driving a herd of 2,000 horses, they just assumed they were Mexican traders on their way to East Texas and Louisiana.

Point of fact those horses HAD been brung to Texas by Mexican traders and had been stolen outside of Victoria. Victoria was the seat of the Mexican Federalist government in exile, and Linnville was where this Federalista government had their armory. Pretty much a slam dunk that the 1,000-odd Comanches and Kiowas on this massive raid were actually acting in concert with the ruling Mexican Centralista faction in that ongoing civil war.

Seventeen years later, according to Frederick Law Olmstead who was there to see it, Mexican vaqueros were STILL driving large herds of horses and mules from Mexico through San Antonio for trade, every week.

Then too, until the coming of the railroad, a large proportion if not most Texas commerce rolled on a large number of poorly defended Mexican carretas, ox carts, crawling all over the plains at a rate of five to ten miles per day (it was Mexican ox cart guys that actually found the gangrenous Oliver Loving wandering on the High Plains after his wounding by Comanches, the incident that inspired Gus's fictional demise in "Lonesome Dove").

What emerges is a Texas Frontier quite different in some ways from that of pop history.

Birdwatcher

Cattle from the mission rancherias around San Antonio and Goliad were driven all the way to Pensacola Fl. to feed General Galvez's troops who had laid seige to the British Garrison there during our revolution with George III! This was about 1780.

Another interesting incident concerning horses in early Texas.

1686 Sieur de la Salle was leading a party set on finding Spanish mines from the little French Fort at Garcitas creek when the they came upon a band of Jumanos on horseback. These cats were from out in the Pecos country on their way to the big native trade fair around present Monument hill in Fayette county.

They were taken first to be Spaniards and the were dressed in the Spanish fashion and riding Spanish saddles and tack. They did not look like the locals!

It is interesting, given the exceedingly lucractive pre-war practice of smuggling African slaves in through Galveston. A trade actively engaged in a different times by the Pirate Jean LaFitte, Jim Bowie and James Fannin.

The new Texas Constitution was officially drawn up and approved at Washington-on-the-Brazos over a period of just three days, actually haven been written before the fact, closely mirroring the US Constitution but differing, in part, with an enhanced protection of slavery.

The ban on importing African slaves into Texas mirrored what had been in effect in the US for nearly thirty years, since 1808, at a time when the British Empire also outlawed their own considerable participation in the African slave trade.

At that time, Thomas Jefferson himself, an owner and even father of slaves, had this to say....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves

I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.

So according to Jefferson, who admittedly was ambiguous about slavery but who could not free his one hundred-plus slaves without ruining himself and his family financially, the motive for the ban was a moral one.

From the follow-the-money angle, since slaves far and away represented the majority of the capital wealth across the Slave States, I gotta wonder if the chief benefit of banning the importation of new slaves was to protect the value of the existing investments that slave ownership represented.

Birdwatcher

Birdy!

Just shot you a PM

Ya, by Tejano Vaqueros, for whom annual cattle drives 250 miles south to Monterrey (rainfall permitting, ya don't want the stock to starve along the way) was a slam dunk.

Turns out too that for the 2,000 residents of San Antonio de Bexar, the annual fall buffalo hunt was a major part of the annual economy of most every household, oxcarts heading out north and west to buffalo country after the manner of the better-remembered Ciboleros of the El Paso region. To them the chief value of longhorns was tallow and hides, longhorn beef being held in low regard. But buffalo was good eating, and the climate ran colder than it commonly does today, robes were good to have around.

These Tejanos were the people in residence here for 100 years before the Alamo but they are generally ignored or mis-cast in pop Texas history.

Birdwatcher

It would currently be known as Baja Oklahoma.

RIP Ford had previously fought alongside Jack Hays, who famously pioneered the use of the revolver against mounted Comanches in 1844. Unfortunately nobody was writing anything down back then so what we get is mostly unsubstantiated and apocryphal. We do know that a guy who rode with Jack Hays in those early years estimated that the fatality rate among his rangers was about 50% a year, whatever tactics they used. "Evenly matched with the bow" was not conducive to longevity.

Who "taught" Jack Hays was his Lipan Apache allies, but really it weren't rocket science, those exact same Apaches that guided Hays also guided Ranger Captain John Moore in his devastating rub-out of a Comanche winter camp, the largest ever single bloodletting inflicted on Comanches, 180 dead, in 1840, accomplished almost entirely with rifles at no loss to themselves.

Almost nobody relative to the whole population joined these ranging companies, it was expensive in terms of gear and horses lost and lethally dangerous.

John Ford in his memoirs left us a much better account of his many skirmishes with Comanches. I'm hard-pressed to think of ANY wherein revolvers were the primary weapon used. He does mention a period of time when somebody with a "Swiss rifle" among the Indians was knocking HIS rangers out of their saddles.

Ford did most of his Indian fighting in South Texas in the 1850's. His last big fight against Comanches was going against Buffalo Hump's camp in the Wichita Mountains of present day Oklahoma in 1860. Again it was rifles, in this case Mississippi rifles, that did most of the execution. Rifles did not imply immobility in the face of mounted opponents, far from it, what you did is gallop within range, jump off, and take careful aim with a rifle.

MOST of the execution against Comanches in these early years was accomplished not by Texans but rather rifle-armed members of the displaced Eastern tribes with whom they came into conflict early on, the Delawares particularly taking a famously heavy toll. South of the Border in the 1850's, the rifle-armed Seminoles and Black Seminoles were actively interdicting Comanche, Apache and Kiowa raiding parties as part of their land deal with Mexico.

Moving on to the 1860's, Texan activity during the war years slows to a trickle as the frontier retreats in the face of Comanche raids, so much so that these are the years Comanches first get into the cattle business in a big way, running off entire herds of cattle to the tune of thousands every year, essentially unopposed.

There was one big fight between the Texas Frontier Battalion and Indians in 1865 when a combined force composed of the Frontier Battalion and Confederate cavalry, guided by Cherokee scouts, went out on a punitive expedition against the Comanches.

Failing to find any Comanches and against the advice of their Cherokee scouts they hit a Kickapoo camp instead. The reclusive Kickapoos were among the displaced Eastern tribes, by that time skilled riflemen for at least three or four generations.

The result was the debacle known as the Battle of Dove Creek, wherein the Texans got their butts handed to 'em in a battle fought almost entirely with rifles.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btd01

Moving on into the 1870's, by that time MOST Kiowas and Comanches are effectively off of the Texas Plains, keeping cattle up in the Indian Territory. Ranald Mackenzie and his hard-riding cavalry drives almost all the remaining holdouts to the Fort Sill Reservation during the Red River War of 1874.

During those years a handful of hard-riding Texans did fight skirmishes with small raiding parties. One of the best accounts comes from the at that time Apache adoptee Herman Lehman. After raiding the frontier settlements Lehman's party was surprised by a company of Texas Rangers that had indeed been riding all night.

In the running fight that ensued Lehman's horse is shot out from under him and he was nearly killed, narrowly making his escape by hiding in tall grass. The pursuing Ranger that accomplished this was armed with a Winchester rifle, dismounting to shoot once within range.

Dunno if anyone read all that Disagreements welcome.

Birdwatcher