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The Republic of Texas
The nine-year country between Mexico and the United States
Before it was a state, Texas was a country, with its own president, congress, navy, embassies, and paper money. Between 1836 and 1845 the Republic of Texas won recognition from the United States, France, Britain, and the Netherlands, while Mexico, from which it had broken away, never accepted its independence. That brief sovereignty left marks that still set Texas apart: the state kept its public lands when it joined the Union, its lone-star flag descends directly from the republic's, and the annexation terms allow it to be divided into as many as five states with its own consent. Few American places carry a former nationhood so openly in their identity.
The republic claimed everything from the Sabine River on the Louisiana border to the Rio Grande, following that river to its source and then north to the 42nd parallel, a claim that took in half of present-day New Mexico, including Santa Fe, and slices of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Mexico treated the Nueces River, well north of the Rio Grande, as the true boundary, and the republic's real authority ended far short of its western claim, where the Comanche held the plains. Settled Texas ran from the pine woods and cotton bottomlands of the east across blackland prairie to the limestone Hill Country. Today the core is the US state of Texas, which surrendered its outer claims in the Compromise of 1850 in exchange for $10 million.
American settlers drawn by Mexican land grants, together with many Tejanos, rebelled in 1835 as Mexico's government centralized power under Antonio López de Santa Anna. Delegates declared independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836. After the fall of the Alamo, Texian forces defeated and captured Santa Anna at San Jacinto on April 21, and he signed the Treaties of Velasco, which the Mexican government later repudiated. The republic's constitution protected slavery, which made annexation divisive in the United States for nearly a decade. Debt, a weak currency, conflict with Native nations, and the threat of Mexican reconquest pushed Texas toward the Union. It was admitted as the 28th state on December 29, 1845, and the dispute over its border helped trigger the Mexican–American War in 1846.