PART 2:
Around the same time, legislators in Texas began hammering out a new constitution for the breakaway region—a constitution that, in language clear as any, illustrates how the Republic of Texas became the first true slave empire in the Americas, surpassing even the U.S. Indeed, while modern Texas Republicans like to view the Texas Revolution as a spiritual successor to the American Revolution, it’s far more accurate to describe it as a precursor to the Confederacy. To wit, the Texas Constitution explicitly prohibited its new government from ever emancipating slaves. Moreover, the constitution expressly barred any Texan from freeing other humans they enslaved, unless they pledged to evict them from the new nation entirely. “No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic, without the consent of Congress,” the constitution read, effectively ensuring that Texian slaveholders would never have to worry about free Black residents.
This language had an immediate impact on both the state’s economy and on the swelling ranks of those enslaved on these shores. In less than a decade of independence, the numbers of Black residents enslaved exploded, growing some 500 percent. And the driving force for the race into American embrace—the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845—likewise centered on slavery. Texians knew full well that a regrouped Mexico could steamroll the slave republic and enforce its abolitionist writ on the region once more. The only thing saving Texians’ ability to enslave other humans was joining the U.S. But even that effort eventually faltered. Just 15 years after annexation, Texas once more declared its intent to secede—this time, as part of yet another would-be slave empire. As Texas’s 1861 declaration of secession made clear, the state existed as “a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race.”
To be fair to Texas Republicans, it’s not yet clear how much the central role of human bondage will play in any “patriotic education” they have in mind. But the reactionary impulses that the “1619 Project” have broadly engendered among conservatives provide a window into why something like this proposed “1836 Project” would suddenly become a cause célèbre among the Lone Star State’s GOP—and who would find it so appealing. For instance, some of the state’s frothing, far-right militias (including those present at the January 6 insurrection) have made similar rhetoric a staple of their fascistic behavior. One in particular—the unfortunately named “This Is Texas Freedom Force,” or TITFF—has not only cozied up to Texas Republicans but has made shoring up whitewashed myths about the Texas Revolution central to its efforts.
But it’s also not surprising that this effort to spin a revisionist version of the Texas Revolution for another generation comes amid titanic shifts in the state’s political realities. Texas appears to be, at some point in the not-so-distant future, a good candidate to be the next state to tilt Democratic, following in the wake of states like Georgia and Arizona. In 2020 alone, Texas boasted the third-highest number of Biden voters, following only California and Florida. And with that looming shift comes a looming reckoning with the state’s sanitized history—and with the key role the perpetuation of slavery played in Texas’s birth.
The contours of this shift are already in motion, and what the reclamation of slavery’s central role in propelling Texas’s 1836 revolution will look like is slowly coming into view. While not everyone is comfortable yet placing slavery as the main cause of the Texas Revolution, voices like the flagship magazine Texas Monthly have dropped any qualms they may have had in portraying it as such. As the magazine tweeted last year, “Slavery was the driving force in Texas’s decision to break free of Mexican control.”
Current and future voices that might attest to the role chattel slavery played in the establishment of Texas will find themselves substantially buoyed by the voices of the past and their own recollections. Former President Ulysses S. Grant—the man who strangled one insurrection as a general and many more as president—was, in many ways, perhaps the most astute observer of the geopolitical tides of the era. To Grant, the iniquitous Mexican-American War was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” (it was), while the Confederacy’s attempted secession was “plainly suicidal for the South” (also true). Grant, as a recent annotated version of his memoirs makes clear, was likewise “never confused about the fact that … ‘slavery’ was the ‘cause’ of the Civil War.”
The Civil War, Grant wrote in his memoirs, became “inevitable” not due to Abraham Lincoln’s election but directly due to the American annexation of Texas.
Neither was he confused about the role Texas played in the lead-up to the Civil War. The Civil War, Grant wrote in his memoirs, became “inevitable” not due to Abraham Lincoln’s election but directly due to the American annexation of Texas. And the “occupation, separation and annexation” of Texas were not due to concerns about dictatorship in Mexico City, or arid concerns about things like “liberty.” Instead, as Grant wrote, it was “from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” The revolution, in other words, lay at the feet of one thing alone: a would-be permanent dominion of slavers and their enslaved.
Grant, of course, was a Republican president unafraid of looking at developments—and insurrectionists, for that matter—as they truly were, rather than as he wished them to be. It’s a lesson that the current crop of Texas Republicans would do well to heed. If not, they may face the same fate as the white supremacist seditionists who once dominated the state before them—and their version of Texas history might, like the Republic of Texas itself, soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Around the same time, legislators in Texas began hammering out a new constitution for the breakaway region—a constitution that, in language clear as any, illustrates how the Republic of Texas became the first true slave empire in the Americas, surpassing even the U.S. Indeed, while modern Texas Republicans like to view the Texas Revolution as a spiritual successor to the American Revolution, it’s far more accurate to describe it as a precursor to the Confederacy. To wit, the Texas Constitution explicitly prohibited its new government from ever emancipating slaves. Moreover, the constitution expressly barred any Texan from freeing other humans they enslaved, unless they pledged to evict them from the new nation entirely. “No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic, without the consent of Congress,” the constitution read, effectively ensuring that Texian slaveholders would never have to worry about free Black residents.
This language had an immediate impact on both the state’s economy and on the swelling ranks of those enslaved on these shores. In less than a decade of independence, the numbers of Black residents enslaved exploded, growing some 500 percent. And the driving force for the race into American embrace—the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845—likewise centered on slavery. Texians knew full well that a regrouped Mexico could steamroll the slave republic and enforce its abolitionist writ on the region once more. The only thing saving Texians’ ability to enslave other humans was joining the U.S. But even that effort eventually faltered. Just 15 years after annexation, Texas once more declared its intent to secede—this time, as part of yet another would-be slave empire. As Texas’s 1861 declaration of secession made clear, the state existed as “a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race.”
To be fair to Texas Republicans, it’s not yet clear how much the central role of human bondage will play in any “patriotic education” they have in mind. But the reactionary impulses that the “1619 Project” have broadly engendered among conservatives provide a window into why something like this proposed “1836 Project” would suddenly become a cause célèbre among the Lone Star State’s GOP—and who would find it so appealing. For instance, some of the state’s frothing, far-right militias (including those present at the January 6 insurrection) have made similar rhetoric a staple of their fascistic behavior. One in particular—the unfortunately named “This Is Texas Freedom Force,” or TITFF—has not only cozied up to Texas Republicans but has made shoring up whitewashed myths about the Texas Revolution central to its efforts.
But it’s also not surprising that this effort to spin a revisionist version of the Texas Revolution for another generation comes amid titanic shifts in the state’s political realities. Texas appears to be, at some point in the not-so-distant future, a good candidate to be the next state to tilt Democratic, following in the wake of states like Georgia and Arizona. In 2020 alone, Texas boasted the third-highest number of Biden voters, following only California and Florida. And with that looming shift comes a looming reckoning with the state’s sanitized history—and with the key role the perpetuation of slavery played in Texas’s birth.
The contours of this shift are already in motion, and what the reclamation of slavery’s central role in propelling Texas’s 1836 revolution will look like is slowly coming into view. While not everyone is comfortable yet placing slavery as the main cause of the Texas Revolution, voices like the flagship magazine Texas Monthly have dropped any qualms they may have had in portraying it as such. As the magazine tweeted last year, “Slavery was the driving force in Texas’s decision to break free of Mexican control.”
Current and future voices that might attest to the role chattel slavery played in the establishment of Texas will find themselves substantially buoyed by the voices of the past and their own recollections. Former President Ulysses S. Grant—the man who strangled one insurrection as a general and many more as president—was, in many ways, perhaps the most astute observer of the geopolitical tides of the era. To Grant, the iniquitous Mexican-American War was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” (it was), while the Confederacy’s attempted secession was “plainly suicidal for the South” (also true). Grant, as a recent annotated version of his memoirs makes clear, was likewise “never confused about the fact that … ‘slavery’ was the ‘cause’ of the Civil War.”
The Civil War, Grant wrote in his memoirs, became “inevitable” not due to Abraham Lincoln’s election but directly due to the American annexation of Texas.
Neither was he confused about the role Texas played in the lead-up to the Civil War. The Civil War, Grant wrote in his memoirs, became “inevitable” not due to Abraham Lincoln’s election but directly due to the American annexation of Texas. And the “occupation, separation and annexation” of Texas were not due to concerns about dictatorship in Mexico City, or arid concerns about things like “liberty.” Instead, as Grant wrote, it was “from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” The revolution, in other words, lay at the feet of one thing alone: a would-be permanent dominion of slavers and their enslaved.
Grant, of course, was a Republican president unafraid of looking at developments—and insurrectionists, for that matter—as they truly were, rather than as he wished them to be. It’s a lesson that the current crop of Texas Republicans would do well to heed. If not, they may face the same fate as the white supremacist seditionists who once dominated the state before them—and their version of Texas history might, like the Republic of Texas itself, soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.
